Reliability Modeling for the Advanced Electric Power Grid: A Proposal for Doctoral Research

The advanced electric power grid is a cyber-physical system comprised of physical components such as power generators and transmission lines, and cyber components that control the operation of the grid. The objective of the proposed doctoral research is to develop a reliability model for the grid that reflects interdependencies among cyber and physical failures, through capturing the semantics of the system operation. We investigate several failure modes for devices that carry out cyber control of the grid, and examine the effect of their failure in terms of physical power flow in the grid. We propose the use of fault injection into the software of the cyber layer to refine the model, as well as the development of statistical methodsto determine confidence levels for our model.