The electric power grid is a complex cyber-physical system, whose reliable and secure operation is of paramount importance to national security and economic vitality. There is a growing and evolving threat of cyber-based attacks, both in numbers and sophistication, on the nation's critical infrastructure. Therefore, cyber security "encompassing attack prevention, detection, mitigation, and resilience" is critical in today's power grid and the emerging smart grid. The goal of this project is to develop a unified system-theoretic framework and analytical tools for cyber-physical security of power systems, capturing the dynamics of the physical system as well as that of the cyber system. Research tasks include: 1) Development of a methodology for impact analysis that includes systematic identification of worst-case stealthy attacks on the power system's wide-area control and evaluating the resulting consequences in terms of stability violations and performance loss. 2) Development of robust cyber-physical countermeasures, employing a combination of methods from system theory, cyber security, and model-based/data-driven tools, in the form of domain-specific anomaly detection/tolerance algorithms and attack-resilient control algorithms. 3) Evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed impact modeling and mitigation algorithms through a combination of simulation and testbed-based evaluations, using realistic system topologies and attack scenarios. The project makes significant contributions to enhance the security and resiliency of the power grid and lays a scientific foundation for cyber-physical security of critical infrastructure. Also, the project develops novel curriculum modules, mentors graduate and undergraduate students including under-represented minorities, leverages industrial collaborations, and exposes high school students to cyber security concepts.

The electric power grid is a complex cyber-physical system, whose reliable and secure operation is of paramount importance to national security and economic vitality. There is a growing and evolving threat of cyber-based attacks, both in numbers and sophistication, on the nation's critical infrastructure. Therefore, cyber security "encompassing attack prevention, detection, mitigation, and resilience" is critical in today's power grid and the emerging smart grid. The goal of this project is to develop a unified system-theoretic framework and analytical tools for cyber-physical security of power systems, capturing the dynamics of the physical system as well as that of the cyber system. Research tasks include: 1) Development of a methodology for impact analysis that includes systematic identification of worst-case stealthy attacks on the power system's wide-area control and evaluating the resulting consequences in terms of stability violations and performance loss. 2) Development of robust cyber-physical countermeasures, employing a combination of methods from system theory, cyber security, and model-based/data-driven tools, in the form of domain-specific anomaly detection/tolerance algorithms and attack-resilient control algorithms. 3) Evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed impact modeling and mitigation algorithms through a combination of simulation and testbed-based evaluations, using realistic system topologies and attack scenarios. The project makes significant contributions to enhance the security and resiliency of the power grid and lays a scientific foundation for cyber-physical security of critical infrastructure. Also, the project develops novel curriculum modules, mentors graduate and undergraduate students including under-represented minorities, leverages industrial collaborations, and exposes high school students to cyber security concepts.

The objective of this research is to establish a foundational framework for smart grids that enables significant penetration of renewable DERs and facilitates flexible deployments of plug-and-play applications, similar to the way users connect to the Internet. The approach is to view the overall grid management as an adaptive optimizer to iteratively solve a system-wide optimization problem, where networked sensing, control and verification carry out distributed computation tasks to achieve reliability at all levels, particularly component-level, system-level, and application level. Intellectual merit. Under the common theme of reliability guarantees, distributed monitoring and inference algorithms will be developed to perform fault diagnosis and operate resiliently against all hazards. To attain high reliability, a trustworthy middleware will be used to shield the grid system design from the complexities of the underlying software world while providing services to grid applications through message passing and transactions. Further, selective load/generation control using Automatic Generation Control, based on multi-scale state estimation for energy supply and demand, will be carried out to guarantee that the load and generation in the system remain balanced. Broader impact. The envisioned architecture of the smart grid is an outstanding example of the CPS technology. Built on this critical application study, this collaborative effort will pursue a CPS architecture that enables embedding intelligent computation, communication and control mechanisms into physical systems with active and reconfigurable components. Close collaborations between this team and major EMS and SCADA vendors will pave the path for technology transfer via proof-of-concept demonstrations.