A Holistic Review on Cyber-Physical Power System (CPPS) Testbeds for Secure and Sustainable Electric Power Grid – Part – I: Background on CPPS and Necessity of CPPS Testbeds

The integration of advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the conventional electric power grid is evolving into a Cyber-Physical Power System (CPPS). The seamless integration of control, communication, and computing operations allow CPPS to be fully monitored and controlled. Threats, vulnerabilities, and catastrophic attacks will intrude as CPPS monitoring, protection, and control functions advance. For the CPPS to operate safely, securely, and efficiently, sustainable cybersecurity solutions must be developed, and the power grid's reliability and resilience must be maintained even when exposed to unfavorable network conditions. While more distributed and renewable energy sources are connected to the grid, cybersecurity helps to ensure the supply of electricity is sustainable and of high quality. The validation of such sustainable cybersecurity analysis goes beyond the traditional power grid network analysis, which means that the test should integrate the physical and cyber system behavior and respond to the network attacks. To analyze the cybersecurity and cyberattacks in the practical CPPS, comprehensive and realistic CPPS testbeds are needed. The heterogeneous nature of the CPPS concept urges multidisciplinary testbeds with various functions and capabilities to evaluate the new cyber-attacks, vulnerabilities, and threats in CPPS. Using this CPPS testbed framework, the different types of cyber-attack can be detected, and detection algorithm can be evaluated, and helps to enhance the development of sustainable cybersecurity defenses for realistic CPPS environment with the increasingly dense integration of distributed energy resources (DERs). This Part-I paper review the CPPS testbeds in the view of the physical power system layer, sensing layer, communication layer, control layer, application layer, test platforms, and research goals with the fusion of cyber and physical systems. In addition, this review presented an overview, structure, and application-based evaluation of existing testbeds from the industry and institutions. The various research areas in CPPS are reviewed first to show the research trends on different aspects of CPPS which have gained significant attention in the past decade. The necessity of testbeds for cyberattacks and sustainable cybersecurity analysis in CPPS are then described. Finally, the NIST framework for CPS, CPPS domains, and research areas are presented. Further the Part-II paper will review the classification, overview, and assessment of CPPS testbeds.