PSP: A Framework to Allocate Resources to Power Storage Systems under Cyber-Physical Attacks

This risk assessment of the smart grid focuses on energy storage, which is essential but largely unaddressed by the current literature. This work concentrates on actions (such as decreasing or increasing power reserve and power dispatch, performing load curtailment or load shedding, or repair of nodes) the defender should take to meet power demand at minimum operating cost in the presence of cyber-physical attacks on the power and information infrastructure of the smart grid. In this paper, we formulate a Power Storage Protection (PSP) framework against a fixed opponent (adversary). We fix the strategy for the adversary and model the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) from the perspective of the defender (power utility) and solve it using POMDP solver. We provide a theoretical framework for formulating the above problem and provide experimental results to support our claim using a simplified PSP scenario in which optimal POMDP policy is computed efficiently.