Multidimensional Resilience for Electrical Power Systems: Systematic Review, Integrated Index, and Validation under Real-World Cyber-Physical Attack Scenarios
University of Massachusetts Boston（麻省大学波士顿分校）
Isaac Ortega Romero, Ioannis Zografopoulos
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35 pages, Elsevier Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews
The accelerating decarbonization of energy systems has transformed electrical power systems into complex infrastructures exposed to threats whose interactions generate systemic vulnerabilities that conventional resilience approaches fail to capture. Although resilience assessment has expanded across multiple dimensions, existing studies largely examine them in isolation or adjacent pairs, leaving cross-dimensional couplings insufficiently explored. This study demonstrates i) that single-dimension assessments fail to capture the degradation produced by simultaneous cross-dimensional failures, ii) the nonlinear amplification emerging when physical, operational, and digital-cyber dimensions are jointly compromised, and iii) the intensification imposed by climatic and economic-regulatory stressors.
To this end, we leverage a hybrid quantitative methodology. A PRISMA 2020 review with backward and forward snowballing identifies methodological gaps and unresolved dependencies across five resilience dimensions: physical, operational, digital-cyber, climatic-external, and economic-regulatory. Following this analysis, a Multidimensional Resilience Index (MDRI) is developed to capture endogenous couplings and exogenous amplification effects and is validated under escalating cyber-physical attack scenarios inspired by the December 2025 attack on Polish energy infrastructure. Results show that degradation under cascading and simultaneous failures is nearly eight times greater than under isolated stress, while exogenous conditions amplify degradation by an additional factor approaching six, with 72% of this amplification driven by exogenous stressors. Combined, these mechanisms produce a 46-fold increase in resilience loss compared to a single-vector reference.
Digitization and remote connectivity have enlarged the attack surface and made cyber systems more vulnerable. As attackers become increasingly sophisticated and resourceful, mere reliance on traditional cyber protection, such as intrusion detection, firewalls, and encryption, is insufficient to secure the cyber systems. Cyber resilience provides a new security paradigm that complements inadequate protection with resilience mechanisms. A Cyber-Resilient Mechanism (CRM) adapts to the known or zero-day threats and uncertainties in real-time and strategically responds to them to maintain critical …
Power systems are large scale cyber-physical critical infrastructure that form the basis of modern society. The reliability and resilience of the grid is dependent on the correct functioning of related subsystems, including computing, communications, and control. The integration is widespread and has a profound impact on the operation, reliability, and efficiency of the grid. Technologies comprising these infrastructure can expose new sources of threats. Mapping these threats to their grid resilience impacts to stop them early requires a timely and detailed view of the entire cyber-physical sy…
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) incorporate the complex and large-scale engineered systems behind critical infrastructure operations, such as water distribution networks, energy delivery systems, healthcare services, manufacturing systems, and transportation networks. Industrial CPS in particular need to simultaneously satisfy requirements of available, secure, safe and reliable system operation against diverse threats, in an adaptive and sustainable way. These adverse events can be of accidental or malicious nature and may include natural disasters, hardware or software faults, cyberattacks, or …
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are often defended in the same manner as information technology (IT) systems -- by using perimeter security. Multiple factors make such defenses insufficient for CPS. Resiliency shows potential in overcoming these shortfalls. Techniques for achieving resilience exist; however, methods and theory for evaluating resilience in CPS are lacking. We argue that such methods and theory should assist stakeholders in deciding where and how to apply design patterns for resilience. Such a problem potentially involves tradeoffs between different objectives and criteria, and suc…
This article provides a tool for analyzing mechanisms that aim to achieve resilience against stealthy, or undetectable, attacks on cyber-physical systems (CPSs). We consider attackers who are able to corrupt all of the inputs and outputs of the system. To counter such attackers, a response scheme must be implemented that keeps the attacker from corrupting the inputs and outputs of the system for certain periods of time. To aid in the design of such a response scheme, our tool provides sufficient lengths for these periods of time in order to ensure safety with a particular probability. We provi…
This paper proposes a cyber-physical cooperative mitigation framework to enhance power systems resilience under extreme events, e.g., earthquakes and hurricanes. Extreme events can simultaneously damage the physical-layer electric power infrastructure and the cyber-layer communication facilities. Microgrid (MG) has been widely recognised as an effective physical-layer response to such events, however, the mitigation strategy in the cyber lay is yet to be fully investigated. Therefore, this paper proposes a resilience-oriented centralised-to-decentralised framework to maintain the power supply …
System complexity has become ubiquitous in the design, assessment, and implementation of practical and useful cyber-physical systems. This increased complexity is impacting the management of models necessary for designing cyber-physical systems that are able to take into account a number of ``-ilities'', such that they are safe and secure and ultimately resilient to disruption of service. We propose an ontological metamodel for system design that augments an already existing industry metamodel to capture the relationships between various model elements and safety, security, and resilient consi…
The design of attacks for cyber physical systems is critical to assess CPS resilience at design time and run-time, and to generate rich datasets from testbeds for research. Attacks against cyber physical systems distinguish themselves from IT attacks in that the main objective is to harm the physical system. Therefore, both cyber and physical system knowledge are needed to design such attacks. The current practice to generate attacks either focuses on the cyber part of the system using IT cyber security existing body of knowledge, or uses heuristics to inject attacks that could potentially har…
Game-Theoretic Resilience Framework for Cyber-Physical Microgrids using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
ABB Ability Innovation Center, Hyderabad（ABB Ability创新中心，海得拉巴）；Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati（印度理工学院特里普蒂学院）；Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad（印度理工学院（ISM）电子工程系，丹巴德）；Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad（印度理工学院（ISM），丹巴德）
This paper develops a community resilience optimization method subject to power flow constraints in the Cyber-Physical-Social Systems in Power Engineering, which is solved using a multi-agent-based algorithm. The tool that makes the nexus between electricity generation on the physical side and the consumers and the critical loads on the social side is the power flow algorithm. Specifically, the levels of emotion, empathy, cooperation, and the physical health of the consumers, prosumers are modeled in the proposed community resilience optimization approach while accounting for the electric powe…
Enhancing Cyber-Resilience in Integrated Energy System Scheduling with Demand Response Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
School of Electrical Engineering, Northeast Electric Power University（东北电力大学电气工程学院）；State Grid XiXian New Area Power Supply Company（国家电网西安新区供电公司）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学人工智能与自动化学院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Institute of Energy Technology, Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学能源技术研究所）；Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工大学）
The resilience of cyberphysical systems to denial-of-service (DoS) and integrity attacks is studied in this paper. The cyberphysical system is modeled as a linear structured system, and its resilience to an attack is interpreted in a graph theoretical framework. The structural resilience of the system is characterized in terms of unmatched vertices in maximum matchings of the bipartite graph and connected components of directed graph representations of the system under attack. We first present conditions for the system to be resilient to DoS attacks when an adversary may block access or turn o…
Model-Free Reinforcement Learning Control for Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems
Departmento de Ingenier\'ia El\'ectrica, Universidad de Concepci\'on, Concepci\'on, Chile (e-mail: )；Department of Electrical \& Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, T6G 1H9, Alberta, AB, Canada (e-mail: )；Department of Chemical；Biological Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3, Canada ( )；Department of Chemical \& Materials Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, T6G 1H9, Alberta, AB, Canada (e-mail: )
With the growing scale of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), it is challenging to maintain their stability under all operating conditions. How to reduce the downtime and locate the failures becomes a core issue in system design. In this paper, we employ a hierarchical contract-based resilience framework to guarantee the stability of CPS. In this framework, we use Assume Guarantee (A-G) contracts to monitor the non-functional properties of individual components (e.g., power and latency), and hierarchically compose such contracts to deduce information about faults at the system level. The hierarchic…
Performance and Resilience of Cyber-Physical Control Systems with Reactive Attack Mitigation
University of Warwick（华威大学）；Oracle India Pvt. Ltd.（甲骨文印度私人有限公司）；GovTech Singapore（新加坡政府科技局）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
A cyber-physical system (CPS) is expected to be resilient to more than one type of adversary. In this paper, we consider a CPS that has to satisfy a linear temporal logic (LTL) objective in the presence of two kinds of adversaries. The first adversary has the ability to tamper with inputs to the CPS to influence satisfaction of the LTL objective. The interaction of the CPS with this adversary is modeled as a stochastic game. We synthesize a controller for the CPS to maximize the probability of satisfying the LTL objective under any policy of this adversary. The second adversary is an eavesdrop…
Developing models and metrics that can address resilience against disruptions is vital to ensure power grid reliability and that adequate recovery and adaptation mechanisms are in place. In this paper, we propose a novel disruption mapping approach and apply it to the publicly available U.S. Department of Energy DOE-417 Electric Emergency and Disturbance Report to holistically analyze the origin of anomalous events and their propagation through the cyber, physical and human domains. We show that capturing the disruption process onset has implications for quantifying, mitigating, and reporting …
Recent advances in smart grid technologies bring opportunities to better control the modern and complex power grids with renewable integration. The operation of power systems, especially distribution network (DN), is facing with preeminent challenges from cyber-physical-human (CPH) threats and natural disasters. In order to provide better response against threats and improve the resilience of power grid, proactive plans and operational schemes are required by system operators to minimize the damages caused by CPH threats. To that end, this paper proposes a proactive plan for DN operation by us…
