Rapid adoption of renewable energy, growth of distributed generation technologies and microgrid deployment, widespread implementations of IoT devices and associated cybersecurity concerns have led to an ever expanding risk landscape and have, in turn, shifted the focus from energy system protection to resilience. Furthermore, the past two decades have seen a consistently increasing interest in the application of tools developed in the interdisciplinary field of complex network analysis to enhance our understanding of functionality, security, and reliability of power systems and critical infrastructures in which power grid networks serve as an integral constituent. Such systems are intrinsically interconnected and interdependent, and as a result, failure of one component due to manmade and natural cause, e.g., adverse weather, aging, and intentional attacks such as terrorism, can lead to a catastrophic cascade of failures. However, one of the key obstacles for developing systematic and reliable assessment of power grid and critical infrastructure resiliency under various threats is unavailability of ground truth data on system response to adversaries due to data security, privacy and confidentiality. Motivated by these problems rooted in the analysis of modern power grids but inherent to many other complex network systems and given public availability of all blockchain transaction transactions, we propose to use blockchain graphs as a test-bed for validation of functionality and resilience metrics on complex power grid networks.
Exploring power grid sensitivity to targeted attacks and failures in scenarios allowing for validation of any proposed methodology against ground truth is the key toward developing reliable risk mitigation strategies for power systems. The novel research approaches to be developed in this project aim to lay foundations for deeper knowledge integration and transfer across power systems, finance, social sciences and other disciplines by utilizing graph-theoretic analysis and adopting a common mathematical language of computational topology. By promoting new synergistic research initiatives, the project will further advance knowledge creation not only on power grids and blockchain but on modern complex networks, from brain connectome to social media platforms to telecommunication-- thereby facilitating resilience and sustainability of our society.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
