Achieving a cyber-secure smart grid through situation aware visual analytics

Utilities face enormous pressure to streamline their operations and provide consumption information to the consumers for better energy management. Smart meters have been instrumental to achieve better energy management. But alike any new deployment of technology, smart meters are prone to cyber attacks. Except, in this case they are part of critical infrastructure of the nation. The goal of this project would be to leverage visual analytics for delivering near-to-real-time visual insights on smart meter data that will help make quicker in times of a cyber response need. Cybersecurity of the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) continues to be one of the top research priorities in the industry right now. Securing the smart grid is about managing a continuum of risk across all the components in the grid within the right timeline. Performing analytics and making decisions based on large volumes of network data in real-time would boost the response time significantly. This research aims at visualizing network data obtained from processing the end-component profile data and network data from the AMI networks through a distributed data processing model.