Dependability Analysis of Control Center Networks in Smart Grid Using Stochastic Petri Nets

As an indispensable infrastructure for the future life, smart grid is being implemented to save energy, reduce costs, and increase reliability. In smart grid, control center networks have attracted a great deal of attention, because their security and dependability issues are critical to the entire smart grid. Several studies have been conducted in the field of smart grid security, but few work focuses on the dependability analysis of control center networks. In this paper, we adopt a concise mathematic tool, stochastic Petri nets (SPNs), to analyze the dependability of control center networks in smart grid. We present the general model of control center networks by considering different backup strategies of critical components. With the general SPNs model, we can measure the dependability from two metrics, i.e., the reliability and availability, through analyzing the transient and steady-state probabilities simultaneously. To avoid the state-space explosion problem in computing, the state-space explosion avoidance method is proposed as well. Finally, we study a specific case to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed model in the dependability analysis of control center networks in smart grid.