A Biologically Inspired Hierarchical Cyber Physical Integrated Security Analysis Framework For Smart Grids

The last few years have witnessed the radical transformation in structure and functionality of electrical energy systems. Such systems were traditionally executed in the physical world and are now also cyber-enabled. This cyber-enabled energy system, called smart grid, can be envisioned as the marriage of information technology with the electricity network. While its increased dependence on cyber infrastructure aims to enable greater reliability, efficiency and capacity of power delivery, this reliance also creates a host of unfamiliar vulnerabilities. Due to the highly integrated and connected nature of smart grids, it is important to account for their salient cyber-physical coupling when making critical design decisions and identifying solutions to promote security. In this dissertation, we present a biologically-inspired cyber-physical integrated security analysis framework for maintaining smart grid stability under various forms of physical and cyber attacks. Through this security analysis framework, we demonstrate real-time cyber-physical integrated control and communication strategies using "wisely"-placed Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and energy storages. Our research has evolved in three stages. We first propose a cyber-physical multi-agent dynamical systems paradigm to model the cyber-physical interactions in smart grids, in which each agent is modeled as having dynamics that synergistically describe physical and information couplings with neighboring agents. Inspired by the analogy between the flocking rules and the smart grid stability requirements, we develop a flocking-based scheme to formulate the cyber-physical integrated action for each agent. In the second stage, we extend the multi-agent dynamical systems paradigm to a two-tier hierarchical framework which reduces information acquisition by leveraging physical couplings between the agents and applying cyber controls selectively on critical agents. In the context of the hierarchical framework, we propose a witness-based security protocol for identifying and mitigating information corruption on the critical agents. In the third stage, we develop an intelligent multicast routing strategy for timely synchronous data delivery in smart grids, called Goal-Seeking Obstacle and Collision Evasion (GOALiE), which is resilient to network congestion and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks.