A Common Automation Framework for Cyber-Physical Power System Studies

Abstract

As the power grid becomes more complex and integrated with communication networks, cyber-attacks become an increasingly relevant threat. CYPRES (Cyber-Physical Resilient Energy Systems) introduces a cyber-physical energy management system for end-to-end defense whose design involves simulating cyber and physical attacks on a power grid by comprehensively modeling a cyber-physical hardware-in-the-loop power system. However, the CYPRES system is tedious to spin up, as multiple subsystems of the framework involve interdependencies across different applications. This paper details a common automation framework for CYPRES that both removes this manual overhead from running the system and drastically improves CYPRES’s initialization speed. With Jenkins, a continuous integration/continuous development tool, the authors have established this automation infrastructure, RESAuto, for CYPRES system and demonstrated the benefits and effectiveness of automating manually intensive operations with simplified operations and less time consumption. This automation system makes it easier to test more complex threat scenarios for larger, more realistic, and manually intensive scenarios.