A CO-simulation platform for simulating cascading failures in smart grid

With the continually adopted smart grid technologies, today´s power systems are becoming hybrid cyber-physical systems. The power control center relies on communication networks to collect data and issue commands to regulate power system parameters and maintain power system facilities at a safety status. However, this hybrid system also increases the risk of being compromised by cyber-attacks. If the control system is attacked, power systems will be out of order and black out may be occurred. Furthermore, various systems, including the communication network, will stop working as power systems are the critical infrastructure of our society. To assess and research the cascading effect between communication networks and physical power system networks, a hybrid co-simulation platform is proposed in this paper. By using synchronization mechanism, this platform integrates both power system network simulator and communication network simulator. The efficiency of our platform is validated by the case study of a cascading failure that induced by malicious modification of power system parameters.