Investigating the Impact of Cyber-Attack on Load Profile of Home Energy Management System

© 2018, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. Load profile for a household is key to understanding and applying automated load scheduling executed by the Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS). The provision of securing this basic domestic information as well as preventing intruders from being able to accessing and modifying them should be a matter of high priority. Any malicious attack on this data will have serious impact on the performance of the load scheduling algorithms. This paper is an investigation of how the scheduled load profile of a household can be deformed due to false data injection on the original load profile as a result of cyber-attack on the HEMS. Various incremental false data levels are introduced during an optimization process and the corresponding effect on the overall scheduled load profile is evaluated to understand the actual impact of the cyber-attack. Results show that as noise attack level increases, the optimized load profile shrinks and approaches a straight line which is equivalent to the average value of the original load profile. The implication of having such a load profile as a schedule is the obvious excessive disruption of a household’s energy use which results to having appliances switched ON or OFF at highly undesired times of the day thereby exacerbating user inconvenience.This work was supported by the British Council and the UK Department of Business Innovation and Skills under GII funding for the SITARA project.Published versio

A Comparative Assessment of Embedded Energy Storage and Electric Vehicle Integration in a Community Virtual Power Plant

© 2018, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. Among the key objectives of the smart grid technology are to foster the grid integration of renewable energy as well as market participation of domestic energy consumers through demand response program. Energy storage remains a key component of the smart grid. Past works on integration of energy storage at the domestic side of the electricity grid has identified the electric vehicle technology (EV) and the embedded energy storage (EES) technology, etc. However, it was difficult to compare between these technologies in terms of business incentives and technical performance. This was investigated in this work, and the results are presented. It was propose to use percentage difference to compare between VPP with EES and VPP with EV. The results shows that the difference in prosumers incentives between VPP with EES and VPP with EV is very low. It is approximately 0.89%. However, the percentage difference in VPP operator profit between VPP with EES and VPP with EV is very high. It is approximately 85.3%. The VPP makes very high profit in the VPP EES case compared to VPP EV case. The same also applies to the VPP cumulative performance where the percentage difference in the VPP cumulative performance between VPP with EES and VPP with EV is approximately 10.9%. This has implication on the storage mechanism to be integrated in to a VPP at the domestic level as well the business model to be adopted.Published versio