The Impact of Operators' Performance in the Reliability of Cyber-Physical Power Distribution Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how operators' response times influence the reliability of Cyber-Physical Power Distribution Systems, introducing a new model and simulation method to quantify this impact and highlight the importance of operator performance.

Contribution

It presents a novel model for operator response time, integrates it into a reliability assessment methodology, and demonstrates its significance through simulation results.

Findings

Operator response time significantly affects reliability indices.

Faster decision-making improves system performance.

Operator performance is crucial for system reliability, alongside hardware components.

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Systems are the result of integrating information and communication technologies into physical systems. One particular case are Cyber-Physical Power Systems (CPPS), which use communication technologies to perform real-time monitoring and operation. These kinds of systems have become more complex, impacting on the systems' characteristics, such as their reliability. In addition, it is already known that in terms of the reliability of Cyber-Physical Power Distribution Systems (CPPDS), the failures of the communication network are just as relevant as the electrical network failures. However, some of the operators' performances, such as response time and decision quality, during CPPDS contingencies have not been investigated yet. In this paper, we introduce a model to the operator response time, present a Sequential Monte Carlo Simulation methodology that incorporates the response time in CPPDS reliability indices estimation, and evaluate the impact of the operator response time in reliability indices. Our method is tested on a CPPDS using different values for the average response time of operators. The results show that the response time of the operators affects the reliability indices that are related to the durations of the failure, indicating that a fast decision directly contributes to the system performance. We conclude that the improvement of CPPDS reliability is not only dependent on the electric and communication components, but also dependent on operators' performance.