This is the final report for the three years of the scientific research project funded by the NATO Public Diplomacy Division in the framework of “Science for Peace”. Project SfP 983805 ‘Designing Intelligent, Resilient, Scalable and Secure Next Generation SCADA Infrastructure’ was granted to Dr. Stefano Zanero (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) and Dr. Zdenko Šimić (University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Croatia). The report is organized into six chapters and three annexes.
Introduction provides information about motivation for the Project, achieved strengthening of national scientific infrastructure and expected economic benefits. Second chapter gives summary of the achieved scientific objectives (i.e., training, cooperation and infrastructure). Third chapter describes Project management structure and participating organizations. Fourth chapter explains in details Project scientific and technical results with special attention to the need for further R&D activities coming after conclusion of the Project. Fifth chapter provides information about status of the Project results implementation and expectations for the immediate and long term future economic benefits. Concluding chapter contains description of SfP experience and tangible consequences of NATO’s funding for the research team and participating institutions. Annexes provide full list of internal and external collaborators, publications written as a result of the work on the Project and complete list of inventory records.
Project background and motivation
The power system (its physical grid, information infrastructure and energy trading systems) is one of the most critical infrastructures (i.e., it is necessary for most of the other critical infrastructures) and therefore its security is essential for modern society. Numerous challenges for keeping reliability and security of the power system are caused by number of recent increasingly significant changes: the consumption of electricity is rising; more and more intermittent renewable energy sources are in use; and energy market is liberalized.
Broad spectrum of approaches for improving power system reliability and safety is presented by so called smart grid concept/paradigm. This is a concept of power system fully enhanced with capabilities of ICT. One major part of such system is SCADA because it represents central point where supervision and control of the systems is carried out. Because of the mission-critical role of SCADA systems, interruptions in the power system (i.e., major accidents caused by faults, natural events, market flaws or attacks) could cause massive damage, financial losses and even physical destruction or loss of life, either directly or indirectly.
This project was motivated with this challenge of new SCADA which would improve reliability and safety by developing hybrid (software-hardware) simulation platform which could integrated all emerging phenomena and analyze power system behavior under different conditions, configurations, scenarios and control solutions. This enormous challenge has required application and integration of several software and hardware solutions.
The goal of this project is primarily related to the new SCADA testbed development which will enable better power system reliability and safety problem understanding and testing of different solutions.
Expected economic and industrial benefits
Importance and expected benefit from this project is based on the fact that research related to the emergent reliability and safety phenomena in the power system is current topic and increasingly relevant. This research involves number of players and it is important to properly connect all of them.
The expected economic and industrial benefits are outlined according to the criteria for success from the project proposal as follows.
1. Feedback from end-users on deliverables - Use of results from this project (contingency plans, experiences and insight gathered while modeling the testbed) was discussed with positive feedback by the following end-users in Croatia: Croatian power company (HEP), Ministry of economy, labor and entrepreneurship (MINGORP), Croatian energy regulatory agency (HERA) and Croatian electricity market regulator (HROTE). This project results complement activities in all these organizations. To HEP, as national power systems utility, this is valuable for every aspect of their operation (i.e., technical and economic). MINGORP is mainly interested in the policy and economic dimensions. While HERA and HROTE are interested in the market regulation related issues.
2. Installation of a working laboratory for testbed R&D - Completely new SCADA testbed laboratory is established at FER, gathering B.Sc., M.Sc. PhD students and researchers in topics related to reliability and security of power system. The laboratory consist of physical and virtual components and allows measurements, modeling and simulations for emergent power systems phenomena. This includes computers, server, distributed generation, and number of advanced software solutions connected as network.
3. Testbed components developed and functionally integrated – The laboratory integration and functional testing is still in progress. This is reasonable considering the scale and complexity of physical and virtual laboratory subsystems. However, usability is already high considering the value at individual subsystem level and at different levels of connectivity and integration.
4. Dissemination of the project results to the international scientific community – Total of 17 papers published in journals and conferences from activities related to this Project. With two more papers submitted for publishing and more expected in the future. Number of PhDs (1 finished and 3 are in progress) and graduation degrees (9 finished and 4 in progress) obtained through co-operation with the Project.
5. More than 3 end-users use one or more deliverables of the project in their operations – Practical implementation and use of project deliverables at the end-user is in progress at the HEP, MINGORP, HROTE and ADNET. This is challenged by both still in progress testing of project deliverables and high level of transitional activities at the end-users (related to the economic crisis, EU accession and energy market restructuring).
Achieved and expected benefits from this project are significant and direct for the research teams and host institutions, and indirect for their countries economy. Quantified benefit is expected to be direct (funding learning capabilities in relevant multidisciplinary field) and longer term (increased scientific capacity, education, research network, and economy).
