Cyber Risk Assessment of Transmission Lines in Smart Grids

The increasing use of information technologies in power systems has increased the risk of power systems to cyber-attacks. In this paper, we assess the risk of transmission lines being overloaded due to cyber-based false data injection attacks. The cyber risk assessment is formulated as bilevel optimization problems that determine the maximum line flows under false data injection attacks. We propose efficient techniques to reduce the computation complexity of solving the bilevel problems. Specifically, primary and secondary filtering techniques are employed to identify the lines whose flows will never exceed their limits, which can significantly reduce computation burden. A special feasibility cut-based acceleration technique is introduced to further reduce the computation burden. The simulation results on the IEEE 30-bus, IEEE 118-bus, IEEE 300-bus and IEEE 2383-bus systems verify the proposed risk assessment model and the effectiveness of the proposed filtering and acceleration techniques.