Abstract

Survivability is defined as the ability of a system to fulfill its mission, in a timely manner, in the presence of attacks, accidents, and failures. The mission of the U.S. electric power industry is to reliably and profitably generate and supply electricity wherever and whenever it is needed in North America. However, the U.S. electric power industry is becoming increasingly dependent on information systems, including highly distributed information systems that operate in unbounded networks, such as the Internet. As a result, the vulnerabilities of these information systems can undermine the industry's ability to supply electricity reliably to its customers. In addition, the current restructuring (deregulation) of the electric power industry creates problems that can threaten the ability of the competitive market to provide reliable electricity service to its customers. We will show that traditional computer security is not adequate to protect the mission of the industry and that a survivability approach is required. In order to study the survivability of the electric power system, simulating the system would be beneficial because we cannot test the real electric power system to evaluate survivability problems and solutions. The Easel simulation language developed at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is appropriate for investigating survivability issues (such as choosing which one of several alternate policy implementations would be the most survivable). In particular, the Easel simulator is based on emergent algorithms, which achieve global effects through local actions and neighbor interactions. Easel is beneficial to simulate the electric power system because the industry has emergent behavior and survivability is a key eme...

Citations