THE ANALYSIS OF INFORMATION IMPACTS IN COORDINATING DEFENSE AGAINST MALICIOUS ATTACKS FOR INTERCONNECTED POWER SYSTEMS

The heightened concern for possible physical or cyber attacks on electricity networks has received con- siderable attention recently. Coordination among the different system operators (SO) of interconnected power systems in developing effective measures against such attacks has become a critically important problem in power system security. This paper presents an analytic tool for the assessment of information impacts in the man- agement of the operational reliability after the onset of a malicious attack. The tool uses multi-agent modeling and casts the problem into a game theoretic context with the equilibrium of a fictitious play being used to analyze the impacts of various levels of information available to the SOs on the outcomes of the decision-making process to respond to the attack. We illustrate the capabilities of the proposed tool on a 34-bus test system that represents a three-area interconnection. We compare the impacts of different information scenarios in terms of the response formulations and discuss the salient aspects of the key findings.