Evaluating Resilience of Water Distribution Networks to Operational Failures from Cyber-Physical Attacks
Publication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 146, Issue 3
Abstract
Water cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have gained increasing interest to improve operational efficiency and reliability. However, due to growing exposure to cyber-physical attacks, cybersecurity and resilience against the attacks have become significant concerns. Efforts have been made to improve cybersecurity in water CPSs, but only a few attempts to investigate resilience against cyber-physical attacks. This study contributes to characterizing the resilience of a water CPS and investigating potential resilience strategies. An advanced resilience measure that integrates the withstanding, absorptive, adaptive, and restorative capabilities of a system is proposed and applied to the C-town water distribution network (WDN) for 15 failure set scenarios during a pressure-driven hydraulic simulation. The results identify the failure sets and unfavorable operational conditions that make the system more vulnerable to cyber-physical attacks and, in turn, produce low resilience and capabilities. Additionally, after the recovery of a disrupted component, adjustment of overall operational interactions across system components is found to be needed for the complete restoration of disrupted functionality. The findings provide insights into infrastructure investments with resilience strategies in cyber and physical water system domains.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all of the data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request (all data from the hydraulic simulation).
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). PNNL is operated for the Department of Energy by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract DE-AC05-76RL01830.
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Published In
Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 146 • Issue 3 • March 2020
Copyright
©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 19, 2019
Accepted: Aug 23, 2019
Published online: Jan 13, 2020
Published in print: Mar 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Jun 13, 2020
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