The analysis of information impacts in coordinating defense against malicious attacks for interconnected power systems

The heightened concern for possible physical or cyber attacks on electricity networks has received considerable attention recently. Coordination among the different system operators (SO) of interconnected power systems in developing effective measures against such attacks has become a critically important problem in power system security. This paper presents an analytic tool for the assessment of information impacts in the management of the operational reliability after the onset of a malicious attack. The tool uses multi-agent modeling and casts the problem into a game theoretic context with the equilibrium of a fictitious play being used to analyze the impacts of various levels of information available to the SOs on the outcomes of the decision-making process to respond to the attack. We illustrate the capabilities of the proposed tool on a 34-bus test system that represents a three-area interconnection. We compare the impacts of different information scenarios in terms of the response formulations and discuss the salient aspects of the key findings.