Catching Anomalous Distributed Photovoltaics: An Edge-based Multi-modal Anomaly Detection

A significant challenge in energy system cyber security is the current inability to detect cyber-physical attacks targeting and originating from distributed grid-edge devices such as photovoltaics (PV) panels, smart flexible loads, and electric vehicles. We address this concern by designing and developing a distributed, multi-modal anomaly detection approach that can sense the health of the device and the electric power grid from the edge. This is realized by exploiting unsupervised machine learning algorithms on multiple sources of time-series data, fusing these multiple local observations and flagging anomalies when a deviation from the normal behavior is observed. We particularly focus on the cyber-physical threats to the distributed PVs that has the potential to cause local disturbances or grid instabilities by creating supply-demand mismatch, reverse power flow conditions etc. We use an open source power system simulation tool called GridLAB-D, loaded with real smart home and solar datasets to simulate the smart grid scenarios and to illustrate the impact of PV attacks on the power system. Various attacks targeting PV panels that create voltage fluctuations, reverse power flow etc were designed and performed. We observe that while individual unsupervised learning algorithms such as OCSVMs, Corrupt RF and PCA surpasses in identifying particular attack type, PCA with Convex Hull outperforms all algorithms in identifying all designed attacks with a true positive rate of 83.64% and an accuracy of 95.78%. Our key insight is that due to the heterogeneous nature of the distribution grid and the uncertainty in the type of the attack being launched, relying on single mode of information for defense can lead to increased false alarms and missed detection rates as one can design attacks to hide within those uncertainties and remain stealthy

A Framework for Robust Steady-State Voltage Stability of Distribution Systems

Power injection uncertainties in distribution power grids, which are mostly induced by aggressive introduction of intermittent renewable sources, may drive the system away from normal operating regimes and potentially lead to the loss of long-term voltage stability (LTVS). Naturally, there is an ever increasing need for a tool for assessing the LTVS of a distribution system. This paper presents a fast and reliable tool for constructing \emph{inner approximations} of LTVS regions in multidimensional injection space such that every point in our constructed region is guaranteed to be solvable. Numerical simulations demonstrate that our approach outperforms all existing inner approximation methods in most cases. Furthermore, the constructed regions are shown to cover substantial fractions of the true voltage stability region. The paper will later discuss a number of important applications of the proposed technique, including fast screening for viable injection changes, constructing an effective solvability index and rigorously certified loadability limits.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figs, published on Transactions on Smart Gri

Impact of Data Quality on Real-Time Locational Marginal Price

The problem of characterizing impacts of data quality on real-time locational marginal price (LMP) is considered. Because the real-time LMP is computed from the estimated network topology and system state, bad data that cause errors in topology processing and state estimation affect real-time LMP. It is shown that the power system state space is partitioned into price regions of convex polytopes. Under different bad data models, the worst case impacts of bad data on real-time LMP are analyzed. Numerical simulations are used to illustrate worst case performance for IEEE-14 and IEEE-118 networks.Comment: Compared to the first version, the authors added in Section IV-E details about the computational issue of the proposed analysi

Enabling Distributed Optimization in Large-Scale Power Systems

Distributed optimization for solving non-convex Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problems in power systems has attracted tremendous attention in the last decade. Most studies are based on the geographical decomposition of IEEE test systems for verifying the feasibility of the proposed approaches. However, it is not clear if one can extrapolate from these studies that those approaches can be applied to very large-scale real-world systems. In this paper, we show, for the first time, that distributed optimization can be effectively applied to a large-scale real transmission network, namely, the Polish 2383-bus system for which no pre-defined partitions exist, by using a recently developed partitioning technique. More specifically, the problem solved is the AC OPF problem with geographical decomposition of the network using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) method in conjunction with the partitioning technique. Through extensive experimental results and analytical studies, we show that with the presented partitioning technique the convergence performance of ADMM can be improved substantially, which enables the application of distributed approaches on very large-scale systems

Grid-side Flexibility of Power Systems in Integrating Large-scale Renewable Generations: A Critical Review on Concepts, Formulations and Solution Approaches

Though considerable effort has been devoted to exploiting generation-side and demand-side operational flexibility in order to cope with uncertain renewable generations, grid-side operational flexibility has not been fully investigated. In this review, we define grid-side flexibility as the ability of a power network to deploy its flexibility resources to cope with the changes of power system state, particularly due to variation of renewable generation. Starting with a survey on the metrics of operational flexibility, we explain the definition from both physical and mathematical point of views. Then conceptual examples are presented to demonstrate the impacts of grid-side flexibility graphically, providing a geometric interpretation for a better understanding of the concepts. Afterwards the formulations and solution approaches in terms of grid-side flexibility in power system operation and planning are reviewed, based on which future research directions and challenges are outlined

A Polynomial-Time Method for Testing Admissibility of Uncertain Power Injections in Microgrids

We study the admissibility of power injections in single-phase microgrids, where the electrical state is represented by complex nodal voltages and controlled by nodal power injections. Assume that (i) there is an initial electrical state that satisfies security constraints and the non-singularity of load-flow Jacobian, and (ii) power injections reside in some uncertainty set. We say that the uncertainty set is admissible for the initial electrical state if any continuous trajectory of the electrical state is ensured to be secured and non-singular as long as power injections remain in the uncertainty set. We use the recently proposed V-control and show two new results. First, if a complex nodal voltage set V is convex and every element in V is nonsingular, then V is a domain of uniqueness. Second, we give sufficient conditions to guarantee that every element in some power injection set S has a load-flow solution in V, based on impossibility of obtaining load-flow solutions at the boundary of V. By these results, we develop a framework for the admissibility-test method; this framework is extensible to multi-phase grids. Within the framework, we establish a polynomial-time method, using the infeasibility check of convex optimizations. The method is evaluated numerically.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Cyber-Physical Systems Security: a Systematic Mapping Study

Cyber-physical systems are integrations of computation, networking, and physical processes. Due to the tight cyber-physical coupling and to the potentially disrupting consequences of failures, security here is one of the primary concerns. Our systematic mapping study sheds some light on how security is actually addressed when dealing with cyber-physical systems. The provided systematic map of 118 selected studies is based on, for instance, application fields, various system components, related algorithms and models, attacks characteristics and defense strategies. It presents a powerful comparison framework for existing and future research on this hot topic, important for both industry and academia.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1205.5073 by other author

Cellular-Base-Station Assisted Device-to-Device Communications in TV White Space

This paper presents a systematic approach to exploit TV white space (TVWS) for device-to-device (D2D) communications with the aid of the existing cellular infrastructure. The goal is to build a location-specific TVWS database, which provides a look-up table service for any D2D link to determine its maximum permitted emission power (MPEP) in an unlicensed digital TV (DTV) band. To achieve this goal, the idea of mobile crowd sensing is firstly introduced to collect active spectrum measurements from massive personal mobile devices. Considering the incompleteness of crowd measurements, we formulate the problem of unknown measurements recovery as a matrix completion problem and apply a powerful fixed point continuation algorithm to reconstruct the unknown elements from the known elements. By joint exploitation of the big spectrum data in its vicinity, each cellular base station further implements a nonlinear support vector machine algorithm to perform irregular coverage boundary detection of a licensed DTV transmitter. With the knowledge of the detected coverage boundary, an opportunistic spatial reuse algorithm is developed for each D2D link to determine its MPEP. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can successfully enable D2D communications in TVWS while satisfying the interference constraint from the licensed DTV services. In addition, to our best knowledge, this is the first try to explore and exploit TVWS inside the DTV protection region resulted from the shadowing effect. Potential application scenarios include communications between internet of vehicles in the underground parking, D2D communications in hotspots such as subway, game stadiums, and airports, etc.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, to appear, 201

A Stochastic Sizing Approach for Sharing-based Energy Storage Applications

In order to foster renewable energy integration, improve power quality and reliability, and reduce hydrocarbon emissions, there is a strong need to deploy energy storage systems (ESSs), which can provide a control medium for peak hour utility operations. ESSs are especially desired at the residential level, as this sector has the most untapped demand response potential. However, considering their high acquisition, operation, and maintenance costs, individual ESS deployment is not economically viable. Hence, in this paper, we propose a \emph{sharing-based} ESS architecture, in which the demand of each customer is modeled stochastically and the aggregate demand is accommodated by a combination of power drawn from the grid and the storage unit when the demand exceeds grid capacity. Stochastic framework for analyzing the optimal size of energy storage systems is provided. An analytical method is developed for a group customers with \emph{single} type of appliances. Then, this framework is extended to any network size with arbitrary number of customers and appliance types. The analytical method provides a tractable solution to the ESS sizing problem. Finally, a detailed cost-benefit analysis is provided, and the results indicate that sharing-based ESSs are practical and significant savings in terms of ESS size can be achieved.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Smart Gri

Identification of Smart Jammers: Learning based Approaches Using Wavelet Representation

Smart jammer nodes can disrupt communication between a transmitter and a receiver in a wireless network, and they leave traces that are undetectable to classical jammer identification techniques, hidden in the time-frequency plane. These traces cannot be effectively identified through the use of the classical Fourier transform based time-frequency transformation (TFT) techniques with a fixed resolution. Inspired by the adaptive resolution property provided by the wavelet transforms, in this paper, we propose a jammer identification methodology that includes a pre-processing step to obtain a multi-resolution image, followed by the use of a classifier. Support vector machine (SVM) and deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) architectures are investigated as classifiers to automatically extract the features of the transformed signals and to classify them. Three different jamming attacks are considered, the barrage jamming that targets the complete transmission bandwidth, the synchronization signal jamming attack that targets synchronization signals and the reference signal jamming attack that targets the reference signals in an LTE downlink transmission scenario. The performance of the proposed approach is compared with the classical Fourier transform based TFT techniques, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed approach in the presence of smart jammers