PhD Oral Exam - Masoud Zadsar, Information and Systems Engineering

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Secure and resilient operation of the power grid is of paramount importance in the modern societies since the country’s economy, industry, social satisfaction, and the functionalities of the other critical national infrastructures heavily rely upon the sustainability of this energy delivery system. Recent studies have evaluated the direct and indirect economic losses induced by large-scale disruptive events in the U.S. between $36bn to $156bn annually, which highlights the importance of resiliency enhancement of the North American power grids. To this end, the situational awareness of the power grid needs to be improved by constant monitoring of the operational data, e.g., generation of power plants, power of transmission lines and transformers, voltage of substations’ terminals, and consumption of customers. The power grid operator utilizes these data to evaluate the system stability margin and make appropriate protection and control decisions. In the traditional power grids, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) is deployed to collect the operational data and measurements across the grid through the communication infrastructure. However, the conventional SCADA fails to provide the operating requirements of future power grids, e.g., high-rate sampled data, accuracy, and time-synchronized measurements. These requirements are crucial in the next generation of power grids to deal with the operational challenges, e.g., uncertainties caused by extensive integration of renewable energy resources and electric vehicles. To tackle the drawbacks of conventional SCADA, wide-area monitoring, protection and control (WAMPAC) systems have emerged as a promising solution, which take the advantageous of information and communication technologies (ICTs), e.g., internet of things (IoT) and global positioning system (GPS), to measure system-wide and time-synchronized data, enhance situational awareness, and counteract the propagation of large-scale disruptive events. WAMPAC systems collect the power grid operational data across entire physical layer and substations through communication infrastructure, synchronize the measurements data based on their timestamp generated by GPS in phasor measurement units (PMUs), and utilize them to evaluate the system operation condition and make appropriate real-time protection and control decisions. Despite the provided advantageous, the reliance of WAMPAC systems on ICTs makes them prone to various threats originating from the cyber space. Based on the recent findings and governmental reports, the cyber-attacks targeting the power grids have been expanding not only in quantity but also in sophistication perspective. The socioeconomic impacts of the real-world cyber-attacks on power grids such as the 2015 Ukrain power grid attack have prompted the national level institutions, e.g., North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and U.S. Department of Energy, to initiate several roadmaps emphasizing the necessity of new adoptions toward cyber security enhancement in the North America power grids. Therefore, as an urgent need, substantial adaptations are required for empowering WAMPAC systems as backbone of the future power grids to prevent, detect, and mitigate potential cyber-attacks while recognizing them from disturbances. To take step toward this adaptation, this research aims to (i) shed lights on the cyber-physical layers and applications of WAMPAC systems, (ii) present the problem statement and investigate attack models threatening the WAMPAC applications, and (iii) propose prevention, detection, and mitigation countermeasures.