Resilience Revisited: A Multidimensional Framework Derived from Realistic Attack Scenarios

Abstract

The increasing penetration of inverter-based resources exposes power systems to coordinated cyber-physical attacks capable of triggering cascading failures and systemic instability. However, existing resilience indicators assess each dimension independently, preventing the quantification of how interdimensional coupling amplifies resilience loss during high-impact, low-probability events. This paper presents a Multidimensional Resilience Index (MDRI) that quantifies degradation across the physical, operational, cyber-digital, climatic, and regulatory dimensions, explicitly distinguishing the independent contribution of each dimension from the additional loss caused by their interactions. The proposed framework is validated on the IEEE 39-bus system implemented in MATLAB/Simulink through two attack scenarios reconstructed from the December 2025 cyberattack on the Polish power grid: a baseline scenario with a single compromised power plant and a coordinated multivector attack. The latter causes system collapse and increases resilience loss nearly eightfold relative to the baseline solely through interdimensional coupling. Including climatic and regulatory stressors produces a further 84% increase, yielding an overall resilience loss nearly fifteen times greater. These findings demonstrate that multidimensional coupling is a dominant driver of resilience degradation and that resilience assessment must explicitly account for interdependencies among dimensions to reveal vulnerabilities overlooked by conventional approaches.

6 pages, IEEE SmartGridComm 2026