Across the globe electric power grids are being upgraded to incorporate modern technologies that promise to overcome a multitude of challenges that the legacy infrastructure is currently facing. Each of these new technologies introduce new complexities and vulnerabilities that can be exploited by cyber adversaries looking to cause prolonged and widespread outages, leading to significant economic costs, public distress, and loss of life. Understanding that no system can ever be invulnerable, cyber-physical systems protection efforts are shifting beyond pure security and towards resilience. Smart grid resilience is a relatively young field of research and hence is still not adequately defined. This paper provides an in-depth investigation into the understanding of power systems resilience to date and proposes a new definition derived from a comparative analysis of existing definitions in the publicly available literature. Additionally a new taxonomy is proposed, which is used to justify the definition and can aid in guiding further research in smart grid resilience and its metrics.

在全球范围内，电网正在升级以整合现代技术，这些技术有望克服传统基础架构当前面临的众多挑战。这些新技术中的每一项都会带来新的复杂性和漏洞，网络攻击者可能会利用这些新技术和弱点来造成长期和广泛的中断，从而导致巨大的经济成本，公众痛苦和生命损失。认识到没有任何系统是永不言败的，因此，网络物理系统的保护工作正在从纯粹的安全性转向弹性。智能电网弹性是一个相对较年轻的研究领域，因此仍未得到充分定义。本文对迄今为止对电力系统的弹性的理解进行了深入研究，并提出了一个新定义，该新定义是通过对公开文献中现有定义的比较分析得出的。另外，提出了一种新的分类法，该分类法可用于证明该定义的合理性，并有助于指导智能电网弹性及其度量的进一步研究。