Scalable Discrete Event Simulation Tool for Large-Scale Cyber-Physical Energy Systems: Advancing System Efficiency and Scalability

Modern power systems face growing risks from cyber-physical attacks, necessitating enhanced resilience due to their societal function as critical infrastructures. The challenge is that defense of large-scale systems-of-systems requires scalability in their threat and risk assessment environment for cyber-physical analysis including cyber-informed transmission planning, decision-making, and intrusion response. Hence, we present a scalable discrete event simulation tool for analysis of energy systems, called DESTinE. The tool is tailored for large-scale cyber-physical systems, with a focus on power systems. It supports faster-than-real-time traffic generation and models packet flow and congestion under both normal and adversarial conditions. Using three well-established power system synthetic cases with 500, 2000, and 10,000 buses, we overlay a constructed cyber network employing star and radial topologies. Experiments are conducted to identify critical nodes within a communication network in response to a disturbance. The findings are incorporated into a constrained optimization problem to assess the impact of the disturbance on a specific node and its cascading effects on the overall network. Based on the solution of the optimization problem, a new hybrid network topology is also derived, combining the strengths of star and radial structures to improve network resilience. Furthermore, DESTinE is integrated with a virtual server and a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) system using Raspberry Pi 5. The performance of star, radial, and hybrid topologies is quantified under standalone operation, virtual server integration, and HIL setup to evaluate scalability and network performance. Results are compared for accuracy with the Common Open Research Emulator (CORE). The results show that DESTinE is efficient and scalable for large-scale test cases. These findings highlight DESTinE’s potential for real-time applications in large-scale cyber-physical systems.