A Novel Four-Level Approach for Improving Power System Resilience Against Intentional Attacks

This study proposes a new four-level model to enhance the resilience of power systems against human attacks. The model considers human attacks such as intelligent attackers and power system planners as defenders. The attackers want to maximize the impact of actions, while the defender tries to avoid imposed costs and damages due to budget limitations. The classic resilience model is a three-level defense-attack-defense (DAD) model, which includes the hardening measure, human attack, and recovery levels. In this study, power system planning, as a new defensive layer, was added prior to the conventional DAD. The proposed method becomes a four-level defense-defense-attack-defense (DDAD) model. To this end, a new four-level defense-defense-attack-defense (DDAD) model is proposed, in which a new defense layer is added to the common three-level defense-attack-defense (DAD) model. Looking at the model more closely, new power plants and substations are added to the power system to improve its resilience, and the most important power plants and substations are determined. Subsequently, a conventional three-level model was applied. In this research, the defender and attacker have strategies with their own costs for every power system component, such as power plants and substations, and their own interactions. The power system model includes the load, power plant and substation, and substation priority, which are defined as a combination of the values of the load and network topology. The proposed model was applied to the IEEE-30 bus test system, and the results indicated the effectiveness of the proposed method.