Mixed strategy for power grid resilience enhancement under cyberattack

Power infrastructure networks continue to be at risk under natural and anthropogenic hazard events. Cyberattacks targeting power grids aim at magnifying the impacts through damage propagation to other dependent infrastructure network. In this respect, the current study focuses on the “draw-down” phase of power infrastructure network resilience considering different centrality measures to evaluate the robustness of power grids against cyberattacks. The study considers two network representations for the grid based on the network’s topological/connectivity (i.e., unweighted network) and the network’s power flow data (i.e., weighted network). Therefore, the study utilizes the evaluated measures to improve network robustness under cyberattacks, through considering (or not) the proposed mixed strategy. Based on the analyses, network-level vulnerability is quantified considering five different scenarios through evaluating two key performance metrics—Topology and Functionality indices. Nonetheless, applying the proposed mixed strategy to limit the attacker’s access to the network hubs would boost the overall grid robustness.