Interfacing techniques in testbed for cyber-physical security analysis of the electric power grid

Abstract

The electric power grid is an heterogeneous cyber-physical system with various physical, cyber/communication, computation, and control components. Individually, each of these components have established models and well developed tools for modeling, simulation and analysis. However, to analyze the impact of cyber events on the power grid, it is essential to bring all these components together in a coherent simulation environment to study the interdependencies of the cyber and physical system. Additionally, increasing instances of cyber attacks on the electric power grid demands tightly coupled cyber-physical co-simulation for security analysis. Integrated simulation of all the components requires interfacing existing domain-specific modeling and simulation tools for cyber-physical security analysis. This is a challenging task given diversity of domain specific physical and cyber systems simulator/ emulators and interface with hardware in the loop. This paper develops and analyzes number of interfacing techniques for integrated simulation of cyber and power systems for cyber-physical security analysis.