Evaluation of Resiliency in a Wide-area Backup Protection System via Model Checking

Modern civilization relies heavily on having access to reliable power sources. Recent history has shown that present day protection systems are not adequate. Numerous backup protection (BP) systems have been proposed to mitigate the impact of primary protection system failures. Many of these novel BP systems rely on autonomous agents communicating via wide-area networks. These systems are highly complex and their control logic is based on distributed computing. Model checking has been shown to be a powerful tool in analyzing the behavior of distributed systems. In this research the model checker SPIN is used to evaluate the resiliency of an agent based wide-area backup protection (WABP) system. All combinations of WABP system component malfunctions that lead to system failure are identified and classified. The results of this research indicate that the WABP system evaluated is more resilient to component malfunctions than previously reported. Possible WABP system improvements are introduced as well