Evaluating Resilience of Water Distribution Networks to Operational Failures from Cyber-Physical Attacks

Abstract

Water cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have gained increasing interest to improve operational efficiency and reliability. However, due to growing exposure to cyber-physical attacks, cybersecurity and resilience against the attacks have become significant concerns. Efforts have been made to improve cybersecurity in water CPSs, but only a few attempts to investigate resilience against cyber-physical attacks. This study contributes to characterizing the resilience of a water CPS and investigating potential resilience strategies. An advanced resilience measure that integrates the withstanding, absorptive, adaptive, and restorative capabilities of a system is proposed and applied to the C-town water distribution network (WDN) for 15 failure set scenarios during a pressure-driven hydraulic simulation. The results identify the failure sets and unfavorable operational conditions that make the system more vulnerable to cyber-physical attacks and, in turn, produce low resilience and capabilities. Additionally, after the recovery of a disrupted component, adjustment of overall operational interactions across system components is found to be needed for the complete restoration of disrupted functionality. The findings provide insights into infrastructure investments with resilience strategies in cyber and physical water system domains.