Bifurcation Analysis for System Resilience: A Case Study on Power Infrastructure

Abstract

Modern cyber-physical systems are becoming increasingly complex, as they integrate digital and physical components to achieve higher levels of efficiency and connectivity. This complexity introduces new vulnerabilities and operational threats to the systems that are hard to predict or deal with. Resilience Engineering (RE) has emerged as a field that focuses on the ability of systems to withstand, adapt to, or recover from disruption or unexpected events, as opposed to traditional risk management methods that rely on reducing variability and uncertainty. However, RE approaches are very diverse and lack consistency, hindering the chances for more adoption, which ultimately impacts the ability to manage complex systems efficiently. This paper explores the use of Bifurcation Analysis to identify resilience capabilities in critical infrastructures. We apply a Bifurcation Analysis for resilience framework to the IEEE 9-Bus power system to analyze its resilience and operational condition under different levels of loading stress. Eigenvalue and continuation analysis are performed to address system stability and to measure absorptive, adaptive, and recovery capabilities. The contributions are the demonstration of the application of the framework to a power system, identifying critical points, and an expansion of the framework by recommending different metrics for different resilient capabilities. The results confirm the utility of the framework to understand and enhance resiliency in critical infrastructure. Future work can be done to address the scalability to larger systems, add operations, and increase simulation complexity.