Securing the Operation of Socially Critical Systems from an Engineering Perspective: New Challenges, Enhanced Tools and Novel Concepts

Abstract

Large-scale infrastructure systems, providing essential goods and services to our societies and economies, are witnessing tighter integration and coupling, notably by the sheer ubiquitous use of cyber-physical systems for integration, communication, and control. Putting the electric power system in focus, the pertinent supervisory and data acquisition systems are not only running through major changes allowing for increased levels of communications but also exposing them to new (cyber) threats. Furthermore, humans are an essential part of these systems interacting with them and developing them into a ''system of socio-technical systems''. In theory, and evidenced by past blackouts, power grids show complex behaviors and a strong influence of contextual factors. While the deterministic ''N-1 security principle'' has been successful in ensuring high performance of the European grid, it has been deemed insufficient to cope with multiple failures, cascading grid tripping scenarios, and non-technical factors and to capture a widened spectrum of threats. Thus, as traditional models often reach their limits, advanced modeling and simulation techniques are necessary, which are partly available and applied. Moreover, past disasters prove the need of focusing on ''after shock behavior'' and precaution against unanticipated events by amplifying absorptive, adaptive, and recovery capabilities. This shift towards increased resilience requires substantial conceptual work and the further development of analytical tools. Here the latest achievements and future challenges in this field of active research, aiming at securing the operation of those systems, are highlighted.

The Problem of Observing Sociotechnical Entities in Social Science and Humanities Energy Transition Research

“…For these visions to become reality, technical innovations must be accompanied by a redesign of the means to coordinate behavior. For the transformation of the energy supply to succeed as a major social project, − operators, managers, regulators, and legislators have to cope with an ever increasing sociotechnical complex made up of a network of heterogeneous elements that interact with the support of digital machines (Kröger 2017). − a significant part of the affected population may have to take on a new role, namely that of active consumers (prosumers) in digital networks coordinating supply and demand; they at least are supposed to utilize smart technology, for example, in their homes, at their workplaces, and when traveling (Verbong, Beemsterboer, and Sengers 2013).…”

Quantifying Electricity Supply Resilience of Countries with Robust Efficiency Analysis

“…Even though recently the global average efficiency slowly improved [1], major electricity supply disruptions still happen (e.g., the 2012 India blackout [2] or the 2015 Turkey blackout [3]). The financial, social and environmental consequences of such disruptions can cause great damage to the economy of a country, its government and citizens [4,5]. Resilience aims at minimizing the impact of these adverse consequences by defining pre-and post-event strategies, making outages less likely or smaller in extent [6,7].…”