Engineering the Advanced Power Grid: Research Challenges and Tasks

1
Engineering the Advanced Power Grid Research
Challenges and Tasks

• M. L. Crow, F. Liu, B. McMillin, D. Tauritz
• crow, fliu, ff, tauritzd_at_umr.edu
• University of Missouri-Rolla
• Rolla, MO

C. Gill cdgill_at_cse.wustl.edu Washington
University St. Louis, MO
D. Niehaus niehaus_at_eecs.ku.edu University of
Kansas Lawrence, KS
Workshop on Research Directions for Security and
Networking in Critical Real-Time and Embedded
Systems (CRTES 06) RTAS 2006, San Jose, CA,
Tuesday, April 4th, 2006
Research supported in part by NSF through MRI
award CNS-0420869 (UMR), CAREER award CCF-0448562
(WUSTL), and EHS award CCR-0311599 (KU) by
DOE/Sandia (UMR) and by DARPA through PCES
contract F33615-03-4111 (WUSTL and KU)
2
Critical Infrastructure Advanced Power Grid

• US DOE Grid 2030 vision motivates new CRTES
  research
• Large, complex, interconnected, real-time,
  critical networks
• Need integrated, decentralized, robust,
  survivable control

3
Challenges Modeling and Semantic Integration

• Formal methods are needed
• Timing and concurrency of physical and cyber
  elements
• Domain-specific optimizations for model checking,
  etc.
• Co-design of verification and validation
  tractable fidelity
• Co-design also needed for
• Hardware and software
• Control applications and system infrastructure
• Resource management and system monitoring at
  run-time

4
Challenges Real-Time Control

• Long-term control (minutes)
• A wider range of distributed algorithms (e.g.,
  Max Flow)
• Architectures for distributed real-time
  coordination
• Verification of mitigation and recovery
  strategies/scenarios
• Dynamic control (seconds)
• Characterize effects of delays on control modes
  and stability
• Characterize and improve timing bounds for
  computation and communication technologies
• Design local and one hop protocols for improved
  control

5
Challenges Fault-Tolerance and Security

• Fault/attack isolation is crucial
• Identify interaction channels empirically and
  through verification
• Remove unnecessary interaction channels where
  possible
• Prevent interference with critical constraints
  over remaining channels
• Non-bypassability matters too
• Ability of one interaction to bypass isolation of
  another interaction
• Impacts fault propagation as well as adversarial
  attack scenarios
• Can model checking and other formal techniques
  help to verify non-bypassability in real-world
  settings?

6
Concluding Remarks

• We have outlined research problems for the
  advanced power grid in three topic areas
• Modeling and semantic integration
• Real-time control
• Fault-tolerance and security
• The topics comprise a new field power
  informatics
• Needs integration of results from CS, EE, ME,
  SSM,
• Raises new problems at intersections of the
  disciplines
• Similar cross-disciplinary fields in other areas
• Automotive, medical devices, aerospace,
  petrochemical,
• Critical infrastructure lessons to be learned in
  each area