On the Control of Microgrids Against Cyber-Attacks: A Review of Methods and Applications

Nowadays, the use of renewable generations, energy storage systems (ESSs) and microgrids (MGs) has been developed due to better controllability of distributed energy resources (DERs) as well as their cost-effective and emission-aware operation. The development of MGs as well as the use of hierarchical control has led to data transmission in the communication platform. As a result, the expansion of communication infrastructure has made MGs as cyber-physical systems (CPSs) vulnerable to cyber-attacks (CAs). Accordingly, prevention, detection and isolation of CAs during proper control of MGs is essential. In this paper, a comprehensive review on the control strategies of microgrids against CAs and its defense mechanisms has been done. The general structure of the paper is as follows: firstly, MGs operational conditions, i.e., the secure or insecure mode of the physical and cyber layers are investigated and the appropriate control to return to a safer mode are presented. Then, the common MGs communication system is described which is generally used for multi-agent systems (MASs). Also, classification of CAs in MGs has been reviewed. Afterwards, a comprehensive survey of available researches in the field of prevention, detection and isolation of CA and MG control against CA are summarized. Finally, future trends in this context are clarified

Distributed Fault-Tolerant Consensus Tracking Control of Multi-Agent Systems under Fixed and Switching Topologies

This paper proposes a novel distributed fault-tolerant consensus tracking control design for multi-agent systems with abrupt and incipient actuator faults under fixed and switching topologies. The fault and state information of each individual agent is estimated by merging unknown input observer in the decentralized fault estimation hierarchy. Then, two kinds of distributed fault-tolerant consensus tracking control schemes with average dwelling time technique are developed to guarantee the mean-square exponential consensus convergence of multi-agent systems, respectively, on the basis of the relative neighboring output information as well as the estimated information in fault estimation. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed fault-tolerant consensus tracking control algorithm

Covariance-Based Estimation for Clustered Sensor Networks Subject to Random Deception Attacks

In this paper, a cluster-based approach is used to address the distributed fusion estimation problem (filtering and fixed-point smoothing) for discrete-time stochastic signals in the presence of random deception attacks. At each sampling time, measured outputs of the signal are provided by a networked system, whose sensors are grouped into clusters. Each cluster is connected to a local processor which gathers the measured outputs of its sensors and, in turn, the local processors of all clusters are connected with a global fusion center. The proposed cluster-based fusion estimation structure involves two stages. First, every single sensor in a cluster transmits its observations to the corresponding local processor, where least-squares local estimators are designed by an innovation approach. During this transmission, deception attacks to the sensor measurements may be randomly launched by an adversary, with known probabilities of success that may be different at each sensor. In the second stage, the local estimators are sent to the fusion center, where they are combined to generate the proposed fusion estimators. The covariance-based design of the distributed fusion filtering and fixed-point smoothing algorithms does not require full knowledge of the signal evolution model, but only the first and second order moments of the processes involved in the observation model. Simulations are provided to illustrate the theoretical results and analyze the effect of the attack success probability on the estimation performance.This research is supported by Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, Agencia Estatal de Investigación and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER (grant no. MTM2017-84199-P)

State of the art of cyber-physical systems security: An automatic control perspective

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 light on how security is actually addressed when dealing with cyber-physical systems from an automatic control perspective. The provided map of 138 selected studies is defined empirically and 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

Two Compensation Strategies for Optimal Estimation in Sensor Networks with Random Matrices, Time-Correlated Noises, Deception Attacks and Packet Losses

Due to its great importance in several applied and theoretical fields, the signal estimation problem in multisensor systems has grown into a significant research area. Networked systems are known to suffer random flaws, which, if not appropriately addressed, can deteriorate the performance of the estimators substantially. Thus, the development of estimation algorithms accounting for these random phenomena has received a lot of research attention. In this paper, the centralized fusion linear estimation problem is discussed under the assumption that the sensor measurements are affected by random parameter matrices, perturbed by time-correlated additive noises, exposed to random deception attacks and subject to random packet dropouts during transmission. A covariance-based methodology and two compensation strategies based on measurement prediction are used to design recursive filtering and fixed-point smoothing algorithms. The measurement differencing method— typically used to deal with the measurement noise time-correlation—is unsuccessful for these kinds of systems with packet losses because some sensor measurements are randomly lost and, consequently, cannot be processed. Therefore, we adopt an alternative approach based on the direct estimation of the measurement noises and the innovation technique. The two proposed compensation scenarios are contrasted through a simulation example, in which the effect of the different uncertainties on the estimation accuracy is also evaluated.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion, Agencia Estatal de InvestigacionEuropean Commission PID2021-124486NB-I0

Distributed filtering of networked dynamic systems with non-gaussian noises over sensor networks: A survey

summary:Sensor networks are regarded as a promising technology in the field of information perception and processing owing to the ease of deployment, cost-effectiveness, flexibility, as well as reliability. The information exchange among sensors inevitably suffers from various network-induced phenomena caused by the limited resource utilization and complex application scenarios, and thus is required to be governed by suitable resource-saving communication mechanisms. It is also noteworthy that noises in system dynamics and sensor measurements are ubiquitous and in general unknown but can be bounded, rather than follow specific Gaussian distributions as assumed in Kalman-type filtering. Particular attention of this paper is paid to a survey of recent advances in distributed filtering of networked dynamic systems with non-Gaussian noises over sensor networks. First, two types of widely employed structures of distributed filters are reviewed, the corresponding analysis is systematically addressed, and some interesting results are provided. The inherent purpose of adding consensus terms into the distributed filters is profoundly disclosed. Then, some representative models characterizing various network-induced phenomena are reviewed and their corresponding analytical strategies are exhibited in detail. Furthermore, recent results on distributed filtering with non-Gaussian noises are sorted out in accordance with different network-induced phenomena and system models. Another emphasis is laid on recent developments of distributed filtering with various communication scheduling, which are summarized based on the inherent characteristics of their dynamic behavior associated with mathematical models. Finally, the state-of-the-art of distributed filtering and challenging issues, ranging from scalability, security to applications, are raised to guide possible future research

Optimal Attack against Cyber-Physical Control Systems with Reactive Attack Mitigation

This paper studies the performance and resilience of a cyber-physical control system (CPCS) with attack detection and reactive attack mitigation. It addresses the problem of deriving an optimal sequence of false data injection attacks that maximizes the state estimation error of the system. The results provide basic understanding about the limit of the attack impact. The design of the optimal attack is based on a Markov decision process (MDP) formulation, which is solved efficiently using the value iteration method. Using the proposed framework, we quantify the effect of false positives and mis-detections on the system performance, which can help the joint design of the attack detection and mitigation. To demonstrate the use of the proposed framework in a real-world CPCS, we consider the voltage control system of power grids, and run extensive simulations using PowerWorld, a high-fidelity power system simulator, to validate our analysis. The results show that by carefully designing the attack sequence using our proposed approach, the attacker can cause a large deviation of the bus voltages from the desired setpoint. Further, the results verify the optimality of the derived attack sequence and show that, to cause maximum impact, the attacker must carefully craft his attack to strike a balance between the attack magnitude and stealthiness, due to the simultaneous presence of attack detection and mitigation