Cyber-Based Contingency Analysis and Insurance Implications of Power Grid

Cybersecurity for power communication infrastructure is a serious subject that has been discussed for a decade since the first North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) critical infrastructure protection (CIP) initiative in 2006. Its credibility on plausibility has been evidenced by attack events in the recent past. Although this is a very high impact, rare probability event, the establishment of quantitative measures would help asset owners in making a series of investment decisions. First, this dissertation tackles attackers\u27 strategies based on the current communication architecture between remote IP-based (unmanned) power substations and energy control centers. Hypothetically, the identification of intrusion paths will lead to the worst-case scenarios that the attackers could do harm to the grid, e.g., how this switching attack may perturb to future cascading outages within a control area when an IP-based substation is compromised. Systematic approaches are proposed in this dissertation on how to systematically determine pivotal substations and how investment can be prioritized to maintain and appropriate a reasonable investment in protecting their existing cyberinfrastructure. More specifically, the second essay of this dissertation focuses on digital protecting relaying, which could have similar detrimental effects on the overall grid\u27s stability. The R-k contingency analyses are proposed to verify with steady-state and dynamic simulations to ensure consistencies of simulation outcome in the proposed modeling in a power system. This is under the assumption that attackers are able to enumerate all electronic devices and computers within a compromised substation network. The essay also assists stakeholders (the defenders) in planning out exhaustively to identify the critical digital relays to be deployed in substations. The systematic methods are the combinatorial evaluation to incorporate the simulated statistics in the proposed metrics that are used based on the physics and simulation studies using existing power system tools. Finally, a risk transfer mechanism of cyber insurance against disruptive switching attacks is studied comprehensively based on the aforementioned two attackers\u27 tactics. The evaluation hypothetically assesses the occurrence of anomalies and how these footprints of attackers can lead to a potential cascading blackout as well as to restore the power back to normal stage. The research proposes a framework of cyber insurance premium calculation based on the ruin probability theory, by modeling potential electronic intrusion and its direct impacts. This preliminary actuarial model can further improve the security of the protective parameters of the critical infrastructure via incentivizing investment in security technologies

ANOMALY INFERENCE BASED ON HETEROGENEOUS DATA SOURCES IN AN ELECTRICAL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM

Harnessing the heterogeneous data sets would improve system observability. While the current metering infrastructure in distribution network has been utilized for the operational purpose to tackle abnormal events, such as weather-related disturbance, the new normal we face today can be at a greater magnitude. Strengthening the inter-dependencies as well as incorporating new crowd-sourced information can enhance operational aspects such as system reconfigurability under extreme conditions. Such resilience is crucial to the recovery of any catastrophic events. In this dissertation, it is focused on the anomaly of potential foul play within an electrical distribution system, both primary and secondary networks as well as its potential to relate to other feeders from other utilities. The distributed generation has been part of the smart grid mission, the addition can be prone to electronic manipulation. This dissertation provides a comprehensive establishment in the emerging platform where the computing resources have been ubiquitous in the electrical distribution network. The topics covered in this thesis is wide-ranging where the anomaly inference includes load modeling and profile enhancement from other sources to infer of topological changes in the primary distribution network. While metering infrastructure has been the technological deployment to enable remote-controlled capability on the dis-connectors, this scholarly contribution represents the critical knowledge of new paradigm to address security-related issues, such as, irregularity (tampering by individuals) as well as potential malware (a large-scale form) that can massively manipulate the existing network control variables, resulting into large impact to the power grid

Social work with airports passengers

Social work at the airport is in to offer to passengers social services. The main methodological position is that people are under stress, which characterized by a particular set of characteristics in appearance and behavior. In such circumstances passenger attracts in his actions some attention. Only person whom he trusts can help him with the documents or psychologically

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen