The power grid is a vast and interconnected cyber-physical system for delivering electricity. Treating the grid as a cyber-physical system requires new perspectives, including analysis techniques as well as operating procedures. Attacks on the grid could detrimentally affect public health and safety, yet its cyber infrastructure is not currently included in the intense analysis of its electrical counterparts. In this talk, we discuss challenges and opportunities for enabling cyber-physical resilience in power systems. The focus is on ensuring effective cyber-physical situational awareness and control under adversarial presence, leveraging both power and cyber measurements and coordinating mitigations to maintain or regain reliable operation of the power system during such an attack. We present this work in context of our Cyber-Physical Resilient Energy Systems (CYPRES) project funded by the US Department of Energy Cyber Security for Energy Delivery Systems (DOE-CEDS) program. The vision of CYPRES is a cyber-physical energy management system that would allow the energy system to be modeled and managed together with its data, communications, and security. Testbeds are an important aspect of implementing and validating this type of research; in this talk, we also discuss ongoing efforts at our Texas A&M Resilient Energy Systems Lab and its intended role to enable more work in this area.
Webinar via Zoom was at 1 P.M. CDT on September 23, 2020.
Presenter: Katherine Davis, Texas A&M University
Katherine Davis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University (TAMU). Prior to joining Texas A&M in 2017, Dr. Davis was a Software Engineer and Senior Consultant for PowerWorld Corporation. Dr. Davis was then with University of Illinois’s Information Trust Institute as a Research Scientist. Her expertise includes large scale modeling, analysis, and simulations of cyber-physical critical infrastructure, where she has particular interest in security-oriented control system analysis techniques. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and B.S. degree from The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Davis is a Senior Member of IEEE in PES and COMSOC and a member of ASEE, HKN, and Tau Beta Pi. She is also the faculty advisor of Texas A&M’s Student Chapters of IEEE-PES-PELS-IAS and HKN.