A risk assessment method for power internet of things information security based on multi-objective hierarchical optimisation

Abstract

Power Internet of Things (PIoT) relies on various smart sensors and edge devices to support the operational status of the power grid. To address the challenge of conducting a comprehensive information security risk assessment for communication among heterogeneous devices in PIoT, a reliable security risk assessment method is proposed. This method, based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), considers four key dimensions: the cloud platform, communication transmission, edge side and terminal side. It integrates information indexes, the asset loss and risk probability to construct a risk assessment scheme oriented towards PIoT information security. The judgement matrix of AHP which fails the consistency test, is modified by using an improved multi-objective particle swarm optimisation (IMPSO) algorithm, while minimising semantic offset distance. Verified through a case study, this method effectively reduces the consistency index to an average of 0.01 and achieves a correlation of 90.86% with traditional AHP assessment results.