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At least 1,081 records · Page 60

Utility Managed Distributed Energy Resources Intelligent Community - UDERMS iCommunity (Final Technical Report)

The Utility Managed Distributed Energy Resources Intelligent Community (UDERMS iCommunity) project, led by PacifiCorp and supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office (Award No. DEEE0009782), aimed to demonstrate an integrated, utility-managed “behind-the-meter” distributed energy resource (DER) program connecting multifamily, commercial, institutional, and industrial buildings to deliver grid services and improve energy efficiency.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Blueprint: Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) Adoption for Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC)-Like Groups

The electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) industry is an incredibly diverse set of participants (EVSE manufacturers, charge network operators (CNOs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), etc.), and with the potential for an Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISAC) or ISAC-like group, it requires a series of guidance for doing a multiparty coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) such that a group like this could be successful. This blueprint provides a template and guidance to stakeholders in the EVSE industry for conducting a multiparty CVD. It also formalizes what multiparty CVD could look like in an ISAC-like group with multiple entities as well as vulnerability coordinators by specifically calling out who in the ISAC-like group may be involved, and which industry members it may apply to. This blueprint leverages tools such as Vultron, VINCE, etc. along with open resources such as the Software Engineering Institutes guide for coordinated vulnerability disclosure, for the stakeholder in the EVSE industry to start up a CVD program of their own.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

EVs-at-RISC: A Secure and Resilient Interoperable SCM Control System Architecture for Electric Vehicle’s-at-Scale (Final Technical Report)

The EVs-at-RISC project was a five-year research, development, and demonstration initiative to create foundational tools for utility-scale fleet aggregation and Smart Charge Management (SCM) of Electric Vehicles (EV), Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure (EVCI), and related Distributed Energy Resources (DER). Rather than seeking to develop and demonstrate highly perfected SCM algorithms and control strategies, this project instead focused on creating foundational software solutions that enable unprecedented digital interoperability across the communications technologies and vendor platforms used to manage EV , EVCI, and DER, as well as existing energy management infrastructure operated by utilities, grid operators, and aggregators. This project then extends these novel interoperability capabilities to develop and deploy powerful middleware abstractions across grid edge networks and EVCI/DER fleet aggregations incorporating modern software tools and best practices, such as CI/CD, to bring the immense capabilities of infrastructure-as-code and policy-as-code to modern grid edge network environments. This addresses the foremost systemic issues preventing realization of any net operational benefits from scaled deployment of behind-the-meter EV, EVCI, and DER assets in electric power grids and markets today. The results of this approach and project unlock massive potential for new SCM capabilities to be easily prototyped, evaluated, and deployed at-scale within the existing grid edge network infrastructure and EVCI/DER technology ecosystem. The EVs-at-RISC project achieves this by extending Open Field Message Bus (OpenFMB), a conceptual model for digital interoperability and distributed intelligence in traditional front-of-meter utility SCADA networks, validating our hypothesis that OpenFMB could be similarly used to solve systemic digital interoperability issues in behind-the-meter environments and unlock real-world utility-scale SCM capabilities without requiring any new proprietary vendor solutions or significant infrastructure reconfiguration.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Virtual Power Plant Architecture and Resilient Design

Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) represent a fundamental shift in electric grid operations, aggregating distributed energy resources (DERs) such as solar panels and battery storage to deliver utility-scale grid services traditionally provided by centralized power plants. This report examines the unique architectural, operational, and digital assurance considerations that distinguish VPPs from conventional utility infrastructure as they scale from pilot projects to mainstream deployment across the United States. While VPPs offer significant opportunities for grid modernization and enhanced flexibility, their distributed, multi-stakeholder architecture introduces distinct security challenges that differ fundamentally from traditional generation facilities. The analysis identifies risks in VPP operations, including device-level security gaps, platform vulnerabilities, and communication protocol weaknesses that create expanded attack surfaces compared to centralized power plants. Through examination of real-world incidents and emerging threat patterns, the report demonstrates how some VPPs' reliance on consumer-owned devices, public internet infrastructure, and complex vendor ecosystems require new approaches to digital assurance and operational security. The findings provide practical guidance for utilities, regulators, and aggregators to implement robust security frameworks and operational best practices essential for maintaining grid reliability as VPP deployment accelerates under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Order 2222 and related regulatory initiatives.

24 - POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Battery Energy Storage Systems Report

Battery energy storage systems (BESS) are a critical component of grid reliability and resilience today, providing rapid response capabilities while enabling grid modernization and capacity expansion across the United States. As utilities, communities, and customers prepare to deploy significant BESS capacity over the next several years, the United States has an opportunity to build security into battery system design and deployments. This report provides a framework for assessing the current dominance of foreign-manufactured components in the supply chains for BESS, inverter-based resources, and transformers. It offers high-impact, actionable solutions to service partners, industry, and government to address supply chain risks for currently installed, in design, and future deployments.

24 - POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) for Standard Development Organizations [Slides]

SDO stands for Standard Development Organization. For our purposes, an SDO is an organization whose primary activities are developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, issuing, or publishing standards. These standards are crucial for interoperability, safety, quality, and innovation across various industries and technologies. In the context of our discussion, when we refer to an "SDO," we are specifically targeting these organizations as our primary audience. The purpose is to provide an overview of CIE and how SDOs can apply its concepts in standards development and updates.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Internet of Things Data Characterization Process: Pattern of Life Behavioral Data Study

The HoneyBee™ TARDIS LDRD team completed a data scoping study that identified the initial processes and procedures to baseline the normal and expected behaviors during operability and interoperability of Internet of Things (IoT) device networks. This research is the initial step in developing a process (or methodology) to inform a much broader information framework incorporating machine learning to determine device pattern-of-life which enables the detection of abnormal IoT behaviors on an individual device, as well as in the context of a larger network.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Programmable Digital Devices used in Advanced Reactors

This paper introduces the concepts of common cause failure, diversity, and defense-in-depth used by the nuclear industry to analyze resilience in reactors. A survey of publicly traded and private companies building advanced reactors and their licensing status is presented. Safety and non-safety systems found in the NuScale Power design are summarized and the likely hardware and software categories used by those systems are enumerated. The importance of industry partners is highlighted. This paper also identifies an alternate path forward without industry partners to advance the knowledge needed to use artificial intelligence to analyze HBOMs and SBOMs to better understand reactor resiliency.

cybersecurity↗

Evaluation of Hardware and Software Bill of Materials (HBOMs/SBOMs) Extraction Methods

Hardware and software bills of materials (HBOMs and SBOMs) provide important visibility into the components, dependencies, and supply chain relationships within programmable digital devices. This visibility is critical for advanced nuclear reactor applications, where use of common or shared hardware components, software libraries, suppliers, or manufacturing processes may create common cause failure (CCF) vulnerabilities despite apparent diversity. This paper evaluates current approaches for obtaining and analyzing HBOMs and SBOMs in support of CCF, diversity and defense-in-depth (D3) assessments, and begins to explore potential methods for artificial intelligence/machine learning-based analysis. The availability of BOM information from advanced reactor manufacturers and vendors, representative hardware and software categories found in advanced reactor systems continues to limit research [13]. This paper compares commonly used BOM formats, including CycloneDX, SPDX, and SWID. It also surveys publicly available tools for generating BOMs from source code, compiled binaries, and hardware-related information, noting limitations in language coverage, system age, and format interoperability. Finally, this paper evaluates methods for correlating BOM data with vulnerability and exploitability information, including VEX, CVE, and CWE resources. The findings indicate that publicly available nuclear-vendor BOMs are limited, making third-party extraction and research into novel analysis techniques necessary.

Cybersecurity↗

Anomaly Detection in Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Trajectories Using LSTM Autoencoder and Gaussian Mixture Model

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) technology has the potential to transform the transportation system. Although these new technologies have many advantages, the implementation raises significant concerns regarding safety, security, and privacy. Anomalies in sensor data caused by errors or cyberattacks can cause severe accidents. To address the issue, this study proposed an innovative anomaly detection algorithm, namely the LSTM Autoencoder with Gaussian Mixture Model (LAGMM). This model supports anomalous CAV trajectory detection in the real-time leveraging communication capabilities of CAV sensors. The LSTM Autoencoder is applied to generate low-rank representations and reconstruct errors for each input data point, while the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is employed for its strength in density estimation. The proposed model was jointly optimized for the LSTM Autoencoder and GMM simultaneously. The study utilizes realistic CAV data from a platooning experiment conducted for Cooperative Automated Research Mobility Applications (CARMAs). The experiment findings indicate that the proposed LAGMM approach enhances detection accuracy by 3% and precision by 6.4% compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods, suggesting a significant improvement in the field.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

A Risk Assessment Framework for Cyber-Physical Security in Distribution Grids with Grid-Edge DERs

Integration of inverter-based distributed energy resources (DERs) is reshaping the landscape of distribution grids to fulfill the socioeconomic, environmental, and sustainability goals. Addressing the technological challenges of DER grid integration requires an adaptive communication layer for efficient DER management and control. This transition has given rise to a cyberphysical system (CPS) architecture within the distribution system, causing new vulnerabilities for cyberphysical attacks. To better address potential threats, this paper presents a comprehensive risk assessment framework for cyberphysical security in distribution grids with grid-edge DERs. The framework incorporates a detailed CPS model accounting for dynamic DER characteristics within the distribution grid. It identifies vulnerabilities in DER communication systems, models attack scenarios, and addresses communication latency crucial for inverter control timescales. Subsequently, the quantification of attack impacts employs an attack probability model including both the vulnerability and criticality of cyber components. The proposed risk assessment framework was validated through testing on the modified IEEE 13-node and 123-node test feeders.

cyberattack↗

A Centralized AI Lakehouse Framework for Brain Tumor MRI Classification and Segmentation, University KPI Forecasting, and Water Potability Prediction

In many university and healthcare projects, models are built for very different data types such as tables, institutional time series, and medical images, but they are deployed as separate applications. In this work, that separation made testing and maintenance difficult because each module had its own pipeline and runtime requirements. This paper presents an integrated AI lakehouse-style implementation that runs three model pipelines inside one containerized backend. For medical imaging, we used MRI datasets from IEEE DataPort: a four-class classification set with 7012 images (5708 train/1304 test) and a segmentation set with 3063 image–mask pairs. The classification model (ResNet50 transfer learning) is evaluated using a proper train–validation–test protocol across multiple splits (80/10/10, 70/10/20, 60/10/30, and 10/30/60), achieving a test accuracy of 99.00% under the standard 80/10/10 split. Additionally, a patient-level evaluation is conducted using an external glioma dataset to provide a more realistic assessment without data leakage. The segmentation model (DeepLabV3-ResNet50) achieved 83.09% validation mIoU and 88.79% Dice score. For university KPI forecasting, we used annual IPEDS and NSF HERD data from 2010 to 2023 for three universities (BSU, EOU, and UAB). To examine the effect of preprocessing on forecasting performance, two case studies are conducted. In the first case, linear interpolation is applied to generate semester-level data. In the second case, the original annual data is used directly without interpolation. Random Forest regression and ARIMA models are evaluated using MAE, RMSE, MAPE, and R 2 . The results showed that interpolation improved apparent forecasting performance due to smoothing, while evaluation on the original annual data provided a more realistic assessment of model behavior. To further validate the framework on a larger dataset, an additional case study is conducted using a student dropout dataset. For water potability, we trained and compared multiple tabular classifiers on a large dataset (1,048,575 samples). A Random Forest model (100 trees, max depth 10) achieved 85.86% test accuracy and high recall for unsafe samples (0.8447). All modules are served via FastAPI and deployed together using Docker, with workflow automation routing requests to the correct endpoint. System-level benchmarking indicates that the backend maintains stable throughput and latency under concurrent requests.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Network Security Challenges and Countermeasures for Software-Defined Smart Grids: A Survey

The rise of grid modernization has been prompted by the escalating demand for power, the deteriorating state of infrastructure, and the growing concern regarding the reliability of electric utilities. The smart grid encompasses recent advancements in electronics, technology, telecommunications, and computer capabilities. Smart grid telecommunication frameworks provide bidirectional communication to facilitate grid operations. Software-defined networking (SDN) is a proposed approach for monitoring and regulating telecommunication networks, which allows for enhanced visibility, control, and security in smart grid systems. Nevertheless, the integration of telecommunications infrastructure exposes smart grid networks to potential cyberattacks. Unauthorized individuals may exploit unauthorized access to intercept communications, introduce fabricated data into system measurements, overwhelm communication channels with false data packets, or attack centralized controllers to disable network control. An ongoing, thorough examination of cyber attacks and protection strategies for smart grid networks is essential due to the ever-changing nature of these threats. Previous surveys on smart grid security lack modern methodologies and, to the best of our knowledge, most, if not all, focus on only one sort of attack or protection. This survey examines the most recent security techniques, simultaneous multi-pronged cyber attacks, and defense utilities in order to address the challenges of future SDN smart grid research. The objective is to identify future research requirements, describe the existing security challenges, and highlight emerging threats and their potential impact on the deployment of software-defined smart grid (SD-SG).

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Digital Twin Framework for the Resilient Remote Monitoring and Operation of Nuclear Microreactors

The nuclear industry is developing new advanced reactor technologies, and many companies are conceptualizing designs for microreactors, a class of nuclear reactor with a sub-20 MWth power output designed to be factory fabricated, easily transportable, and simple to control. Microreactors offer promising solutions to several use cases for which large-scale plants would not be suitable, and conventional power generation means, notably diesel electric generators, are expensive and logistically difficult. Many of the potential use cases are in isolated locations such as arctic communities, remote mines, and military installations. Therefore, the cost of microreactor deployment and traditional onsite operations pose a challenge that requires new technical solutions to address. One solution that has the potential to greatly improve economics is to operate and monitor microreactors remotely from a centralized location. Remote monitoring and operation are novel concepts to the nuclear industry and will greatly alter the tasks and responsibilities associated with current commercial nuclear power plant operators. As such, it is important to perform research on potential technological solutions and the impacts those solutions have on operations with end-goal of defining a safe and effective remote concept of operations. This paper proposes a framework for resilient remote operation of microreactors enabled by a novel digital twin implementation.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Access Control of Web and Java Based Applications

Cyber security has gained national and international attention as a result of near continuous headlines from financial institutions, retail stores, government offices and universities reporting compromised systems and stolen data. Concerns continue to rise as threats of service interruption, and spreading of viruses become ever more prevalent and serious. Controlling access to application layer resources is a critical component in a layered security solution that includes encryption, firewalls, virtual private networks, antivirus, and intrusion detection. In this paper we discuss the development of an application-level access control solution, based on an open-source access manager augmented with custom software components, to provide protection to both Web-based and Java-based client and server applications.

cybersecurity↗

Network Security via Biometric Recognition of Patterns of Gene Expression

Molecular biology provides the ability to implement forms of information and network security completely outside the bounds of legacy security protocols and algorithms. This paper addresses an approach which instantiates the power of gene expression for security. Molecular biology provides a rich source of gene expression and regulation mechanisms, which can be adopted to use in the information and electronic communication domains. Conventional security protocols are becoming increasingly vulnerable due to more intensive, highly capable attacks on the underlying mathematics of cryptography. Security protocols are being undermined by social engineering and substandard implementations by IT (Information Technology) organizations. Molecular biology can provide countermeasures to these weak points with the current security approaches. Future advances in instruments for analyzing assays will also enable this protocol to advance from one of cryptographic algorithms to an integrated system of cryptographic algorithms and real-time assays of gene expression products.

cybersecurity↗

Network Security via Biometric Recognition of Patterns of Gene Expression

Molecular biology provides the ability to implement forms of information and network security completely outside the bounds of legacy security protocols and algorithms. This paper addresses an approach which instantiates the power of gene expression for security. Molecular biology provides a rich source of gene expression and regulation mechanisms, which can be adopted to use in the information and electronic communication domains. Conventional security protocols are becoming increasingly vulnerable due to more intensive, highly capable attacks on the underlying mathematics of cryptography. Security protocols are being undermined by social engineering and substandard implementations by IT organizations. Molecular biology can provide countermeasures to these weak points with the current security approaches. Future advances in instruments for analyzing assays will also enable this protocol to advance from one of cryptographic algorithms to an integrated system of cryptographic algorithms and real-time expression and assay of gene expression products.

cybersecurity↗