A preliminary study of power system reliability evaluation considering cyber attack effects

As various novel smart grid technologies are being developed and deployed, the power system is becoming more vulnerable to malicious cyber attacks as it is more open to users. The reliability of the power system can be impacted by diverse types of attacks on its components. This paper deals with the impact of power system reliability due to the cyber attacks. A forced outage rate (FOR) model is proposed considering the impacts of cyber attacks on the reliability characteristic of generators and transmission lines. Different occurrences of the cyber attacks targeting the system lead to different effects on the FOR values. The loss of load probabilities (LOLP) curves in two reliability test systems are simulated based on 35 scenarios with different numbers of attacks. The simulation results showed that the reliability of the power system becomes worse as the number of attacks increases.