An integrated framework for power and ICT system risk-based security assessment

The vulnerability of power systems to natural and man-related threats, as well as their increasing dependency on ICT systems and uncertainties of influent factors, urge to adopt integrated approaches for security assessment and control. Moreover, the need to analyze high impact events (causes of past blackouts) calls for the adoption of the risk concept to perform more in-depth security analyses. The present paper describes a probabilistic risk-based methodology, developed within the EU research project AFTER, aiming to perform risk assessment (including hazard, vulnerability, and impact analysis) of the integrated power and ICT systems. The paper focuses on the steps to build the assessment framework based on: threat/vulnerability identification and classification, contingency modeling, power system response modeling and computation of risk indicators for operation and operational planning purposes.