The U.S. modern critical infrastructure is full of digitized components.  In a power grid, this includes distributed energy resources (DERs), which come in various forms and functions, are geographically spread out, and susceptible to not only natural hazards, but also cyberattacks. DERS are devices such as smart meters, solar inverters and power-quality sensors that are programmable as well as network connected.  These networks, as currently designed, typically rely on a single control center for analysis and decision making, i.e. a single point of failure if it or one of the devices is hacked or infiltrated by an adversary.

There is an urgent need to design the system so that when a cyber breach occurs, the system doesn’t just shut down or relinquish complete system control.  A multidisciplinary effort from LLNL mathematicians, system analysts, power engineers, cybersecurity experts and computational scientists looked to collaborative autonomy to address this cybersecurity issue with critical Infrastructure control systems.

Collaborative autonomy is a new class of computational techniques that teaches networked devices how to self-organize into a collective whole so that it could reliably monitor the system, detect improper commands, be able to defend itself by isolating compromised devices or control centers and maintain stable operations.  That is to say, no single device or control point can compromise the entire system or cause a network failure.