Enhancing the Robustness of Cyber–Physical Power Systems: Optical Configuration of Software-Defined Optical Networks

The risk of cross-domain cascading failures in cyber–physical power systems (CPPSs) has become increasingly significant. The existing studies generally employ communication networks with static routing and fixed bandwidth allocation, which are insufficient to cope with dynamic load fluctuations and unexpected faults. To address these limitations, this paper incorporates the flexible optical-layer resource scheduling capability of software-defined optical networks (SDONs) and proposes an SDON-enabled CPPS model along with a control network optimization method. First, a three-layer CPPS architecture based on the SDON framework is constructed to characterize the interaction mechanism between the control layer and the data forwarding layer, as well as the fault propagation paths. Second, a control network optimization configuration model with the objective of minimizing energy consumption is established in which primary–backup routing schemes and wavelength resources are jointly designed using a mixed-integer linear programming approach. Finally, with load shedding rate adopted as the evaluation metric, a multidimensional vulnerability assessment method for CPPSs is proposed. The simulation results demonstrate that, compared with random control networks, the optimized CPPS reduces the average energy consumption by 53.6% and 34.2% under single-fault and multiple-fault scenarios, respectively, while the load shedding rate is reduced by 23% and 37.2%, thereby verifying the effectiveness of the proposed method.