Providing a Model for a Cyber-Attack to a Special Protection Scheme Based on Timed Petri Net

Abstract

In order to enhance the reliability of the power transmission grid, planning and employing regional protection along with traditional local protection is necessary. Both regional and wide area protection is contingent upon communication and data networking infrastructure and hence prone to cyber-attacks. Moreover, since this kind of protection maintains network integrity while taking into account the specified combinatorial parameters; its output is not necessarily consistent with the output of local protection mechanisms. In other words, applying regional protection alters the arrangement of the whole network for maintaining the interests of all consumers. On the contrary, the local manager of transmission or distribution network may find this in conflict with his/her interests and may even take actions against it via cyber-attacks.<br />The primary step to analyze these types of cyber-attacks is the ability to define the attacks in an adjustable way in a parametric model so that one can explicitly test different forms of attacks and subsequently offer methods to deal with them.<br />In the present study, a multi-stage attack has been extracted and modeled with a timed Petri net, and then the results are compared with those of similar articles.