An Integrated Tool For Supporting The Design And Virtual Evaluation Of Smart Grids

Energy grids and critical infrastructures in general undergo drastic changes. Specifically, energy grids evolve from centrally managed hierarchical networks with central production to locally supplied Smart Grids with distributed management. Therefore, information and communication technology (ICT) is added to these critical infrastructures. Thus, they become vulnerable to new attack vectors introduced by ICT. New methods and processes cannot be tested in real networks as such test are expensive and risk the proper function of the critical infrastructures. Existing simulation software either does not take ICT attacks into account or is designed too general with a lot of abstraction loss. In this paper, we present a time-discrete simulation environment that enables the simulation of smart grid ICT components. Moreover, attacks can be modeled and can be injected into the simulation. With the help of our simulation environment, system designers can evaluate the behaviour in the presence of threats and identify vulnerabilities as well as possible solutions already during the design phase. We present our simulation environment based on a case study extracted from a research project on the resilience of energy grids and exemplary show how two attacks influence the underlying critical infrastructure.