EMS communication routings’ optimisation to enhance power system security considering cyber-physical interdependence

Abstract

Energy management system (EMS) is one of the most essential categories of the advanced applications in current cyber-physical power systems. However, because of the tight coupling relationship between a power network and EMS's communication network, a physical break-line fault may be accompanied by a communication line outage, which may result in regional unobservability and uncontrollability. To maximally avoid and eliminate such operation risks, referring to current EMS's ‘active + standby’ communication configuration scheme in China, the authors propose a dynamic routing optimisation mechanism for its standby communication routings, assigning the most reliable communication lines to the most important information. Such optimisation considers two factors: information's significance and the reliability of communication lines. By introducing cyber-physical sensitivity index and path-branch incidence matrix, both factors can be expressed numerically. In the case study, the authors optimise the standby communication routings for a power flow corrective control application under different scenarios. The results verify the effectiveness and superiority of their approach