Abstract

Smart grid involves the imposition of an advanced cyber layer atop the physical layer of the electricity grid, in order to improve the efficiency, security and cost of electricity use and distribution, and to allow for greater decentralization of power generation and management.  This cyber-physical setting motivates a number of problems in network analysis, and this talk will briefly describe several of these problems together with approaches to solving them. These include competitive privacy in which multiple grid entities seek an optimal trade-off between privacy lost and utility gained from information sharing; distributed inference in which both the cyber and physical network topologies have roles to play in achieving consensus; real-time topology identification which helps in the mitigation of cascading failures; and attack construction which seeks an understanding of optimal strategies for attacking the grid in support of the design of effective countermeasures.