Fault-Tolerant Secure Data Aggregation Schemes in Smart Grids: Techniques, Design Challenges, and Future Trends

Secure data aggregation is an important process that enables a smart meter to perform efficiently and accurately. However, the fault tolerance and privacy of the user data are the most serious concerns in this process. While the security issues of Smart Grids are extensively studied, these two issues have been ignored so far. Therefore, in this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of fault-tolerant and differential privacy schemes for the Smart Gird. We selected papers from 2010 to 2021 and studied the schemes that are specifically related to fault tolerance and differential privacy. We divided all existing schemes based on the security properties, performance evaluation, and security attacks. We provide a comparative analysis for each scheme based on the cryptographic approach used. One of the drawbacks of existing surveys on the Smart Grid is that they have not discussed fault tolerance and differential privacy as a major area and consider them only as a part of privacy preservation schemes. On the basis of our work, we identified further research areas that can be explored

Architectural design and load flow study of power flow routers

Power flow routing is an emerging control paradigm for the dynamic and responsive control of electric power flows. In this paper, we investigate the design and modelling of the power flow router (PFR) which is a major building block of power flow routing. First, a generic PFR architecture is proposed to encapsulate the desired functions of PFRs. Then, the load flow model of PFRs is developed and incorporated into the optimal power flow (OPF) framework. Based on the load flow model, the control capabilities of PFR, such as decoupled branch power flows and enlarged flow regions, are analysed. With particular attention to available transfer capability (ATC), an OPF study on the standard IEEE benchmark systems with 14, 57, and 118 buses has been performed to show that ATC can be enhanced remarkably by installing the proposed PFRs at some critical buses of the power network.published_or_final_versio

Survey on synchrophasor data quality and cybersecurity challenges, and evaluation of their interdependencies

Synchrophasor devices guarantee situation awareness for real-time monitoring and operational visibility of smart grid. With their widespread implementation, significant challenges have emerged, especially in communication, data quality and cybersecurity. The existing literature treats these challenges as separate problems, when in reality, they have a complex interplay. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of quality and cybersecurity challenges for synchrophasors, and identifies the interdependencies between them. It also summarizes different methods used to evaluate the dependency and surveys how quality checking methods can be used to detect potential cyberattacks. This paper serves as a starting point for researchers entering the fields of synchrophasor data analytics and security

An Energy Management Service for the Smart Office

The evolution of the electricity grid towards the smart grid paradigm is fostering the integration of distributed renewable energy sources in smart buildings: a combination of local power generation, battery storage and controllable loads can greatly increase the energetic self-sufficiency of a smart building, enabling it to maximize the self-consumption of photovoltaic electricity and to participate in the energy market, thus taking advantage of time-variable tariffs to achieve economic savings. This paper proposes an energy management infrastructure specifically tailored for a smart office building, which relies on measured data and on forecasting algorithms to predict the future patterns of both local energy generation and power loads. The performance is compared to the optimal energy usage scheduling, which would be obtained assuming the exact knowledge of the future energy production and consumption trends, showing gaps below 10% with respect to the optimum

Energy Disaggregation Using Elastic Matching Algorithms

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)In this article an energy disaggregation architecture using elastic matching algorithms is presented. The architecture uses a database of reference energy consumption signatures and compares them with incoming energy consumption frames using template matching. In contrast to machine learning-based approaches which require significant amount of data to train a model, elastic matching-based approaches do not have a model training process but perform recognition using template matching. Five different elastic matching algorithms were evaluated across different datasets and the experimental results showed that the minimum variance matching algorithm outperforms all other evaluated matching algorithms. The best performing minimum variance matching algorithm improved the energy disaggregation accuracy by 2.7% when compared to the baseline dynamic time warping algorithm.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Distribution Grid Monitoring Based on Widely Available Smart Plugs

During the last few years, smart home devices have become increasingly popular. Smart plugs, smart lights, and smart switches are now found in as many as 37 percent of German households, and the popularity of these devices is rising. Smart devices sometimes also integrate sensors for measuring voltage and current. The increase in renewable generation, e-mobility and heat pumps lead to scenarios for which the distribution grid was not originally designed. Moreover, parts of the distribution grid are only sparsely instrumented, which leaves the distribution grid operator unaware of possible bottlenecks resulting from the introduction of such loads and renewable generation. To overcome this lack of information, we propose a grid monitoring that is based on measurements of widely available smart home devices, such as smart plugs. In the present paper, we illustrate the collection and utilization of smart plug measurements for distribution grid monitoring and examine the extent and effect of measurement inaccuracy. For this evaluation, we analyze the measurements of multiple commercially available smart plugs and test the effect of measurement errors on the monitoring when using a single smart plug.Comment: 8 pages

A data management platform for personalised real-time energy feedback

This paper presents a data collection and energy fe edback platform for smart homes to enhance the value of information given by smart energy meter da ta by providing user-tailored real-time energy consumption feedback and advice that can be easily accessed and acted upon by the household. Our data management platform consists of an SQL server back-end which collects data, namely, aggregate power consumption as well as consumption of major appliances, temperature, humidity, light, and motion data. These data streams allow us to infer information about the household’s appliance usage and domestic activities, which in t urn enables meaningful and useful energy feedback. The platform developed has been rolled ou t in 20 UK households over a period of just over 21 months. As well as the data streams mentioned, q ualitative data such as appliance survey, tariff, house construction type and occupancy information a re also included. The paper presents a review of publically available smart home datasets and a desc ription of our own smart home set up and monitoring platform. We then provide examples of th e types of feedback that can be generated, looking at the suitability of electricity tariffs a nd appliance specific feedback

Cybersecurity in Power Grids: Challenges and Opportunities

Increasing volatilities within power transmission and distribution force power grid operators to amplify their use of communication infrastructure to monitor and control their grid. The resulting increase in communication creates a larger attack surface for malicious actors. Indeed, cyber attacks on power grids have already succeeded in causing temporary, large-scale blackouts in the recent past. In this paper, we analyze the communication infrastructure of power grids to derive resulting fundamental challenges of power grids with respect to cybersecurity. Based on these challenges, we identify a broad set of resulting attack vectors and attack scenarios that threaten the security of power grids. To address these challenges, we propose to rely on a defense-in-depth strategy, which encompasses measures for (i) device and application security, (ii) network security, and (iii) physical security, as well as (iv) policies, procedures, and awareness. For each of these categories, we distill and discuss a comprehensive set of state-of-the art approaches, as well as identify further opportunities to strengthen cybersecurity in interconnected power grids