Cyber-Physical Systems Research Lab


The title of our project “Remotely Accessible Cyber-Physical System Testbed and Open Architecture Synchrophasor Systems for Bangladesh’s National Power Grid’s Cyber Security and Reliability” has been funded by the Energy and Power Research Council (EPRC) of the Government of Bangladesh. The industry partner of this project is the Power Grid Company of Bangladesh (PGCB) (a GoB owned company that takes care of national power grid).

The usefulness of our research comes from the systems’ ability for precise energy auditing, flow monitoring and rapid identification of instability in the national power grid and to trigger remedial actions in-time to prevent major power system outages. According to a recent survey by Cintuglu et al. (2017), the CPS Testbed we will be building in this project will be the first in South Asia.

The system will bring huge utility for the research community, and academia for vulnerability assessment, impact analysis, system testing, attack-defense exercises, and operator training.



Challenges Related to National Power Grid



National Power Grid is the lifeline of the country. Growing demand and participation of multiple operators putting increasing pressure on reliability and safety on the national grid.

The present SCADA-based monitor systems for national power grid acquire data every 2 to 5 seconds from each monitoring point.

This is a low sampling rate and collected data are not time synchronized.

Since the SCADA data are not time-stamped at the point of measurement, they do not capture state of the system at a given moment in time. It may cause incorrect control actions by the operators in control centers. Non-time stamped data has no historic value.

Operators views on the power network must be more fine-grained and cover a wider area, moving across multiple organizations in order to improve reliability and stability of the grid.

The control centers have no capability to understand Cyber Security related threats.



Long-term Goal and Project Sustainability

We (NSU) are looking to provide R&D support to PGCB for long-term sustainability of the project. It is expected that project will sustain through training, grants from the PGCB, EPRC and maintaining power grid data. The CPS Testbed can also be used by other Power System utilities and academic institutions. PMU technology can also be used for building high performance power meter and relays (controlling devices). Our plan is to commercialize PMU devices and related technologies, where the PI, additionally, wants to setup a company through EPRC’s planned incubation support.