A power system and synchrophasor communication network co-simulation testbed with a real-time cyber security application

The development of smart grids facilitates the deployment of phasor measurement units (PMUs) to improve the system stability and reliability. The growing installation of PMUs provides grid operators wide-area situational awareness while introducing additional vulnerabilities to power systems from the cyber security point of view. Thus, not only the online method to handle such vulnerabilities real-time but also the corresponding power system simulation environments with appropriate time-fidelity are needed. This thesis presents two major works: an interactive, extensible environment for power system simulation and a real-time malicious PMU data detection method. The first part introduces such an environment that operates with power system models in the PMU time frame, including data visualization and interactive control action capabilities. The flexible and extensible capabilities are demonstrated by interfacing with a synchrophasor communication network simulation, which is a testbed for developing real-time PMU data related applications. The second part proposes an online method to detect ongoing contingencies in the system and malicious data attack on its underlying synchrophasor communication network. To do so, the principal component analysis is applied to leverage the spatial and temporal correlations among the PMU data, and the method is implemented in the synchrophasor network simulation for data collection and tests. Pattern match and data reconstruction are proposed to identify incident types and find their most possible locations. The thesis illustrates the extensibility of the interactive simulation environment and the effectiveness of the proposed method with a 150 buses case