Towards more realistic co-simulation of cyber-physical energy distribution systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a modular co-simulation environment combining communication network emulation and power grid simulation to study cybersecurity and resilient operation in future smart distribution grids.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated co-simulation platform enabling realistic testing of communication and power system interactions for cybersecurity and resilience analysis.

Findings

Demonstrated use cases through laboratory tests

Enabled cybersecurity attack simulations

Supported testing of active management strategies

Abstract

The increased integration of information and communications technology at the distribution grid level offers broader opportunities for active operational management concepts. At the same time, requirements for resilience against internal and external threats to the power supply, such as outages or cyberattacks, are increasing. The emerging threat landscape needs to be investigated to ensure the security of supply of future distribution grids. This extended abstract presents a co-simulation environment to study communication infrastructures for the resilient operation of distribution grids. For this purpose, a communication network emulation and a power grid simulation are combined in a common modular environment. This will provide the basis for cybersecurity investigations and testing of new active operation management concepts for smart grids. Exemplary laboratory tests and attack replications will be used to demonstrate the diverse use cases of our co-simulation approach.