Biblio

The smart grid is a complex cyber-physical system (CPS) that poses challenges related to scale, integration, interoperability, processes, governance, and human elements. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its government, university and industry collaborators, developed an approach, called CPS Framework, to reasoning about CPS across multiple levels of concern and competency, including trustworthiness, privacy, reliability, and regulatory. The approach uses ontology and reasoning techniques to achieve a greater understanding of the interdependencies among the elements of the CPS Framework model applied to use cases. This paper demonstrates that the approach extends naturally to automated and manual decision-making for smart grids: we apply it to smart grid use cases, and illustrate how it can be used to analyze grid topologies and address concerns about the smart grid. Smart grid stakeholders, whose decision making may be assisted by this approach, include planners, designers and operators.

Processing smart grid data for analytics purposes brings about a series of privacy-related risks. In order to allow for the most suitable mitigation strategies, reasonable privacy risks need to be addressed by taking into consideration the perspective of each smart grid stakeholder separately. In this context, we use the notion of privacy concerns to reflect potential privacy risks from the perspective of different smart grid stakeholders. Privacy concerns help to derive privacy goals, which we represent using the goals structuring notation. Thus represented goals can more comprehensibly be addressed through technical and non-technical strategies and solutions. The thread of argumentation - from concerns to goals to strategies and solutions - is presented in form of a privacy case, which is analogous to the safety case used in the automotive domain. We provide an exemplar privacy case for the smart grid developed as part of the Aspern Smart City Research project.