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Contract Opportunity

TECHNOLOGY LICENSING OPPORTUNITY

Cyber Physical State Awareness for Resilience (CyPhStAR)

A novel strategy of integrating the physical, cyber, and resilience components of the distribution power grid.

Opportunity: Idaho National Laboratory (INL), managed and operated by Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC (BEA), is offering the opportunity to enter into a license and/or collaborative research agreement to commercialize CyPhStAR. This technology transfer opportunity is part of a dedicated effort to convert government-funded research into job opportunities, businesses and ultimately an improved way of life for the American people.

Overview: Historical decision support for power utilities is strictly limited to understanding of physical failure and reliability analysis, which focused only on highly predictable failures using well developed tools. However, an understanding of cyber-attack vectors and the impact of damaging attacks or storms, which require a developing resilience analysis, are not available for these utilities.

The concept of resilience is relatively new, where high level definitions exist but the research and even demonstration of the benefit is not widely accepted. Specifically, the definitions often refer to the ability of the system to plan, recognize and adapt to damaging storms and cyber-attacks. However, no metrics for measuring resilience have been accepted by the power industry or implemented in any current operational technology (OT) system.

This new INL technology provides an integrated cyber-physical root cause and resilience analysis, and visualization approach that could be integrated into current power systems.

Description: The consideration of cybersecurity, while a more recent concern to the OT community, is still an operation controlled by information technology (IT) cybersecurity experts separately from the OT operations. As the OT operator has no indication of the root cause of a failure, if it were to be cybersecurity, the decision support available from the human machine interface (HMI) would only support response to physical root cause. Within INL’s design, both cyber and physical root cause is integrated, as well as systemic resilience, in HMI visualization prototypes for power system operators to quickly recognize root cause and impact to resilience. In addition, to advance the role-to-role interactions, role-based visualization prototypes have been created that provide the right amount of context between roles. So, for instance, the cyber defender would know what aspects of the power system operation are more important, and as a result, the priority.

Benefits:

• The first solution to provide an integration of cyber, physical, and resilience analysis information for actionable, rapid understanding of root cause and impact.


• Allow the operator to work effectively across roles to quickly, and better, find the priority problem areas and rapidly mitigate.

Applications:

• Power utilities security and analysis.

Development Status: TRL 4. System has been validated in a laboratory environment.

IP Status: Provisional Patent Application No. 63/203,146, “Tracking of Health and Resilience of Physical Equipment and Related Systems,” BEA Docket No. BA-1312.

INL is seeking to license the above intellectual property to a company with a demonstrated ability to bring such inventions to the market. Exclusive rights in defined fields of use may be available. Added value is placed on relationships with small businesses, start-up companies, and general entrepreneurship opportunities.

Please visit Technology Deployment’s website at https://inl.gov/inl-initiatives/technology-deployment for more information on working with INL and the industrial partnering and technology transfer process.

Companies interested in learning more about this licensing opportunity should contact Andrew Rankin at td@inl.gov.

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