Impact identification and assessment of cyber contingencies on measurement availability of power systems

Abstract Extensive adoption of Information and Communication Technologies makes power systems and communication systems more tightly coupled to form cyber‐physical power systems. It causes power systems to be growingly susceptible to cyber contingencies. Cyber contingencies may sabotage measurement availability, further disrupt the observability analysis in state estimation, and thus threaten the stable operation of power systems. This paper investigates the impact of cyber contingencies on measurement availability. A workflow is presented to achieve accurate and meticulous impact identification under intricate communication architectures with various cyber contingencies. And a set of indicators are proposed to quantitatively evaluate measurement availability. Case studies demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in identifying and assessing the impact of cyber contingencies on measurement availability. Meanwhile, the proposed workflow and indicators can also be employed to dynamically evaluate the system's resilience in protecting measurement transmission against hypothetical cyber contingencies, which could benefit the offline planning and online operation of cyber‐physical power systems