Visible to the public Substation Monitoring to Enhance Situational Awareness \#x2014; Challenges and Opportunities

TitleSubstation Monitoring to Enhance Situational Awareness \#x2014; Challenges and Opportunities
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2017
AuthorsAshok, A., Sridhar, S., Rice, M., Smith, J.
Conference Name2017 IEEE Power Energy Society Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT)
Keywordscomposability, cyber security, Energy management, expert systems, grid operation, grid operators, grid reliability, malicious cyber activity, Metrics, Monitoring, monitoring substations, Monitoring tools, power engineering computing, power grid, power grids, power system reliability, power system security, Protocols, pubcrawl, recovery functions, reliability, Resiliency, security of data, situational awareness, Software, sophisticated cyber attacks, substation monitoring, Substations, suitable attack response, system operator, Tools
Abstract

Situational awareness during sophisticated cyber attacks on the power grid is critical for the system operator to perform suitable attack response and recovery functions to ensure grid reliability. The overall theme of this paper is to identify existing practical issues and challenges that utilities face while monitoring substations, and to suggest potential approaches to enhance the situational awareness for the grid operators. In this paper, we provide a broad discussion about the various gaps that exist in the utility industry today in monitoring substations, and how those gaps could be addressed by identifying the various data sources and monitoring tools to improve situational awareness. The paper also briefly describes the advantages of contextualizing and correlating substation monitoring alerts using expert systems at the control center to obtain a holistic systems-level view of potentially malicious cyber activity at the substations before they cause impacts to grid operation.

URLhttp://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8085998/
DOI10.1109/ISGT.2017.8085998
Citation Keyashok_substation_2017