Towards Cyber-Physical Special Protection Schemes: Design and Development of a Co-Simulation Testbed Leveraging SCEPTRE™

Unpredictable disturbances with dynamic trajectories such as extreme weather events and cyber attacks require adaptive, cyber-physical special protection schemes to mitigate cascading impact in the electric grid. A harmonized automatic relay mitigation of nefarious intentional events (HARMONIE) special protection scheme (SPS) is being developed to address that need. However, for evaluating the HARMONIE-SPS performance in classifying system disturbances and mitigating consequences, a cyber-physical testbed is required to further development and validate the methodology. In this paper, we present a design for a co-simulation testbed leveraging the SCEPTRE™ platform and the real-time digital simulator (RTDS). The integration of these two platforms is detailed, as well as the unique, specific needs for testing HARMONIE-SPS within the environment. Results are presented from tests involving a WSCC 9-bus system with different load shedding scenarios with varying cyber-physical impact.