1
Design and Development of a New Smart Grid
Course at Washington State University
Anurag K Srivastava, Senior Member, IEEE, Carl Hauser, David Bakken, Senior Member, IEEE, and
Min Sik Kim, Member, IEEE
Abstract-- This paper overviews our experience with design
and development of a new smart grid course focused on cyber-
security. The course is team-taught by power and computer
science faculty members and intended for seniors and graduate
students from computer science and engineering. Key areas of
focus, covered in this paper are the need for a new course and the
course description along with our experience in locating and
creating course materials.
Index Terms—Workforce development, smart grid education,
course development.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE electric power industry is currently going through a
major upgrade with ongoing smart grid activities. Smart
grid technologies are already being deployed in pilot
projects and the implementation phase is imminent for some
projects [1]. At the same time, a major part of the current
power and energy workforce will be retiring in next few years
[2-3]. This creates a need for workforce development efforts
and training in interdisciplinary technical areas used in smart
grid development [4-6]. Existing educational programs and
curricula need to be evolved to fit the need of students, faculty
and employers for a workforce that is capable of deploying
and operating the smart grid.
The interdisciplinary expertise required for smart grid
technologies, including measurements, communication,
computing, and control, make the required education and
training more challenging. Power engineering operation and
design problems need to be formulated in a different way to
be understandable by non-power engineers for better
development and implementation of smart grid [7-8]. There
are a number of initiatives by the IEEE Power and Energy
Society (PES) and other professional organizations in
response to this challenging problem of smart grid education
[9-10]. The Power and Energy Workforce Collaborative is one
of the initiatives from PES working towards solving this
problem.
Using funding available from Department of Energy
(DOE) through Power System Engineering Research Center,
an interdisciplinary course focused on the cyber-security
aspects of the smart grid is being developed at Washington
State University.
Anurag Srivastava, Carl Hauser, David Bakken and Min Sik Kim are with
the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington
State University (e-mail: asrivast@eecs.wsu.edu).
978-1-4673-2729-9/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE
II. COURSE DESCRIPTION
The course being developed at WSU has four components:
smart grid operation and control; communication; data
management and computing; and basics of cyber-security.
The course will be team taught by the co-authors of this paper
and titled, “Critical Infrastructure Security: The Emerging
Smart Grid”. Our objectives in creating this course were:
• Design a course with multi-disciplinary content
integrating topics from data communication, computing,
control, cyber-security and power systems that are
relevant to secure operations of smart grids.
• Design a course to target audience of senior
undergraduate and graduate engineering and computer
science students.
• Design a course that could be offered to online distance
engineering students or engineers from industry as well as
in the conventional classroom setting.
• Design course materials to be easily adopted by
instructors at other schools.
• Design course evaluations that allow us to assess course
outcomes and improve the content.
Course topic coverage is as follows:
• Smart Electric Grid Overview (3 weeks)
o Week 1: Overview and introduction to the smart grid
o Week 2: Sense, communicate, compute and control
in secure way
o Week 3: Performance objectives, SCADA,
NERC/FERC, operational standards
• Communication (3 weeks)
o Week 1: Layered communication model, physical &
link layers, network layer
o Week 2: Transport layer: datagram and stream
protocols; glue protocols: ARP, DNS, Routing
o Week 3: MPLS; Power system application-layer
protocols: SCADA, ICCP, IEC 61850, C37.118;
multi-cast and its uses
• Power System Data Management and Computation (3
weeks)
o Week 1: Utility IT infrastructures; control center
structure & software; CIMs, IEC 61850 and 61970
o Week 2: Fault-tolerant computing basics; distributed
computing basics
o Week 3: Distributed computing architectures;
middleware; WAMS data delivery requirements and
mechanisms

• Cyber-Security (3 weeks)
o Week 1: Basic concepts and applications of
cryptography; software vulnerabilities
o Week 2: Malware, network attacks, web security:
Stuxnet
o Week 3: Network protection, security testing,
security practices, governmental efforts
• Linking all topics together (1-2 weeks)
o Overall system architecture, WAMS application,
NERC CIP standards, case studies
This course will be offered for the first time in Spring,
2012, in a face-to-face setting and also online. The course will
meet class two times a week with each lecture being
approximately 75-minutes. The course will be offered online
using the Tegrity lecture capture software and the Angel
course management system available at WSU media services.
Student’s feedback and evaluation of course will be taken
into account to improve the course contents and organization
in future offerings. Students’ performance on assignments,
quizzes, exams and a project will be another measure for
learning objectives of this course.
III. SUMMARY
A new smart grid course is in development at Washington
State University in line with the need for interdisciplinary
training to support the smart grid. This course will cover
communication, computation and control aspects of the smart
grid emphasizing cyber-security aspects. After taking this
course, students are expected to contribute to security aspects
of industrial projects related to the electric grid. Students will
be able to understand vulnerabilities and the threats to the
power grid and associated infrastructure in addition to
understanding the basic principles of smart grid components
and operation. Students are expected to critically analyze the
interdependencies of related infrastructure in smart grid and
apply the interdisciplinary principles that they have learned in
building the smart grid.
IV. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Authors would like to thank the Department of Energy, the
National Science Foundation and the Power Systems
Engineering Research Center for financially supporting the
work reported in this paper.
V. REFERENCES
[1] B. Hamilton, M. Summy, “Benefits of the Smart Grid”, IEEE Power and
Energy Magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2011, vol. 9, issue 1, pp. 104 – 102.
[2] H. Louie and A. Srivastava, “Resources for pre-university power
engineering outreach”, IEEE PES General Meeting, Detroit, MI, 24-29th
July, 2011.
[3] A. J. Flueck, “K-12 research experiences for teachers and other career
promotion resources”, IEEE PES General Meeting, Detroit, MI, 24-29th
July, 2011.
[4] P. Sauer, “Educational needs for the “Smart Grid” workforce”, IEEE
Power and Energy Society General Meeting, 25-29 July 2010,
Minneapolis, MN.
[5] M Ilić, “Teaching smart grids: Yet another challenge and opportunity for
transforming power systems curriculum”, IEEE Power and Energy
Society General Meeting, 25-29 July 2010, Minneapolis, MN
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[6] G. Heydt, M. Kezunovic, P. Sauer, A. Bose, J. McCalley, C. Singh, W.
Jewell, D. Ray, V. Vittal, “Professional resources to implement the
“smart grid””, North American Power Symposium (NAPS), 2009, 4-6
Oct. 2009, Starkville, MS, USA
[7] M. Crow, “Programmed for success: Educating tomorrow’s workforce”,
IEEE power and energy magazine, vol. 8, issue 4, July-August, 2010
[8] G. F. Reed, W. E. Stanchina, “Smart grid education models for modern
electric power system engineering curriculum”, IEEE Power and Energy
Society General Meeting, 25-29 July 2010, Minneapolis, MN
[9] N. Schulz, W. Reder, “The challenges and opportunities of workforce
development in power engineering and how the IEEE PES is helping”,
International Universities Power Engineering Conference, Padova, Italy,
September, 2008.
[10] W. Reder, A. Bose, A. Flueck, M. Lauby, D. Niebur, A. Randazzo, D.
Ray, G. Reed, P. Sauer, and F. Wayno, “Engineering the Future”, IEEE
Power and Energy Magazine, July-Aug. 2010, vol. 8, issue 4, pp. 27-35.
VI. BIOGRAPHIES
Anurag K. Srivastava (M’05, SM’08) received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical
Engineering from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA in 2005 and M.Tech. and
B.Tech degree from India. He is working as Assistant Professor at
Washington State University since August 2010. In the past, he worked as
Assistant Research Professor at Mississippi State University during 2005-
2010. Before that, he worked as Research Assistant and Teaching Assistant at
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA and as Senior Research
Associate at Electrical Engineering Department at the Indian Institute of
Technology, Kanpur, India as well as Research Fellow at Asian Institute of
Technology, Bangkok, Thailand. His research interests include power system
operation and control, power system modeling and real time simulation,
electricity market and engineering education. Dr. Srivastava is a senior
member of IEEE and member of IET, ASEE, IEEE Power and Energy Society
(PES), Sigma Xi and Eta Kappa Nu. He is chair of IEEE PES career
promotion subcommittee, vice-chair of IEEE PES student activities and active
member of several other PES technical committees. He is the recipient of
numerous awards including IEEE best paper award and author of more than
hundred technical publications including a book.
Carl H. Hauser is an Associate Professor of Computer Science in the School
of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Washington State
University (WSU). His research interests include concurrent programming
models and mechanisms, networking, programming language implementation,
and distributed computing systems. Prior to joining WSU, he worked at Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center and IBM Research for a total of over 20 years. He
holds degrees in computer science from Washington State University (B.S.,
1975) and Cornell University (M.S., 1977, and Ph.D., 1980).
David E. Bakken as an Associate Professor of Computer Science at
WSU/EECS. His research interests include wide-area data delivery
mechanisms for power grids (for the last 13 years), new kinds of middleware,
and fault-tolerant distributed computing. He is co-chair of the WAMPAC
symposium for IEEE SmartGridComm 2012. Prior to joining WSU he was a
research scientist at BBN. He holds a BS degree in mathematics (1985), and
degrees in computer science from WSU (BS 1985) and the University of
Arizona (MS 1990 PhD 1994). Prior to Arizona he worked for Boeing, and he
has consulted to Amazon.com, Harris Corp, Real-Time Innovations, and
others.
Min Sik Kim is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Washington
State University. Prof. Kim earned a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering
from Seoul National University in 1996, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer
Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. His research interests
include network traffic analysis, intrusion detection, and smart grid security.