Towards a framework of enabling efficient and secured energy based cyber-physical system (CPS)

Abstract

CPSs are referred to the systems that are built from the synergy of computational, communication, and physical components. The design of CPS tends to integrate computation and communication capabilities with monitoring and controlling of entities in the physical world. Unlike traditional embedded systems, CPSs are engineered physical systems, which are integrated, monitored and controlled by an intelligent computational core. A number of CPSs, including the Smart Grid, process control systems, transportation systems, and healthcare systems are expected to be developed using advanced computing and communication technologies. The Smart Grid, as an energy-based CPS, must be dependable, cost-effective, secure, safe, and efficient and operate in real-time, which is a highly distributed and complicated system that manages and controls geographically dispersed assets. This kind of system inherently operates under the presence of uncertainty or unpredictable behavior due to intrinsic and extrinsic courses and cyber adversaries. By providing efficient and secured operation performance of the Smart Grid, high volume data streams associated with the Smart Grid operations need to be quickly processed and analyzed, raising significant challenges, which can hinder the effectiveness of systems themselves. To address those challenges and corresponding issues, in this dissertation, we develop a framework to enable efficient and secured energy based CPS by developing effective schemes to address the uncertainty in both cyber and physical components in the Smart Grid. To be specific, first, to adapt physical uncertainties, we develop techniques to effectively manage distributed renewable energy resources to make the energy transmission and distribution more efficient. Second, to investigate cyber uncertainties to the system, we systematically explore the space of attacks in energy management and investigate the risk of those attacks and countermeasures. Finally, we investigate cloud computing to efficiently store and process big data for the Smart Grid operations and security management.