The Cyber-Resilience Index: Quantification and Measurement of Resilience for Virtual Power Plants, a Systems Engineering Approach

The Cyber-Resilience of critical infrastructures has been a topic of heightened interest in both academia and society. In engineering terms, however, it has remained a vague property. In this paper, we present an approach to the systematic analysis and quantification of resilience for Commercial Virtual Power Plants (CVPPs), using systems engineering analytical approaches and system dynamic methods, such as stock and flow diagrams. By understanding Cyber-Resilience as a product of emergence, we systematically identify and analyse the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) as a complex system and consolidate our Cyber-Resilience quantification with the Cyber-Resilience Index (CRI), a function of observability, controllability and trustworthiness indices. We deploy our proposed solution to a real-world live production system of a VPP consisting of more than 1500 distributed generators, and amounting to 4 GW of installed capacity, for proof-of-concept (PoC) validation of our modeling and conceptual approach. Our results show that indeed model-based system engineering approaches have the capacity to graduate Cyber-Resilience from a theoretical construct to a technical reality.