Reinforcement Learning and Game Theory for Smart Grid Security

This dissertation focuses on one of the most critical and complicated challenges facing electric power transmission and distribution systems which is their vulnerability against failure and attacks. Large scale power outages in Australia (2016), Ukraine (2015), India (2013), Nigeria (2018), and the United States (2011, 2003) have demonstrated the vulnerability of power grids to cyber and physical attacks and failures. These incidents clearly indicate the necessity of extensive research efforts to protect the power system from external intrusion and to reduce the damages from post-attack effects. We analyze the vulnerability of smart power grids to cyber and physical attacks and failures, design different gametheoretic approaches to identify the critical components vulnerable to attack and propose their associated defense strategy, and utilizes machine learning techniques to solve the game-theoretic problems in adversarial and collaborative adversarial power grid environment. Our contributions can be divided into three major parts:Vulnerability identification: Power grid outages have disastrous impacts on almost every aspect of modern life. Despite their inevitability, the effects of failures on power grids’ performance can be limited if the system operator can predict and identify the vulnerable elements of power grids. To enable these capabilities we study machine learning algorithms to identify critical power system elements adopting a cascaded failure simulator as a threat and attack model. We use generation loss, time to reach a certain percentage of line outage/generation loss, number of line outages, etc. as evaluation metrics to evaluate the consequences of threat and attacks on the smart power grid.Adversarial gaming in power system: With the advancement of the technologies, the smart attackers are deploying different techniques to supersede the existing protection scheme. In order to defend the power grid from these smart attackers, we introduce an adversarial gaming environment using machine learning techniques which is capable of replicating the complex interaction between the attacker and the power system operators. The numerical results show that a learned defender successfully narrows down the attackers’ attack window and reduce damages. The results also show that considering some crucial factors, the players can independently execute actions without detailed information about each other.Deep learning for adversarial gaming: The learning and gaming techniques to identify vulnerable components in the power grid become computationally expensive for large scale power systems. The power system operator needs to have the advanced skills to deal with the large dimensionality of the problem. In order to aid the power system operator in finding and analyzing vulnerability for large scale power systems, we study a deep learning technique for adversary game which is capable of dealing with high dimensional power system state space with less computational time and increased computational efficiency. Overall, the results provided in this dissertation advance power grids’ resilience and security by providing a better understanding of the systems’ vulnerability and by developing efficient algorithms to identify vulnerable components and appropriate defensive strategies to reduce the damages of the attack

Resilience assessment and planning in power distribution systems:Past and future considerations

Over the past decade, extreme weather events have significantly increased worldwide, leading to widespread power outages and blackouts. As these threats continue to challenge power distribution systems, the importance of mitigating the impacts of extreme weather events has become paramount. Consequently, resilience has become crucial for designing and operating power distribution systems. This work comprehensively explores the current landscape of resilience evaluation and metrics within the power distribution system domain, reviewing existing methods and identifying key attributes that define effective resilience metrics. The challenges encountered during the formulation, development, and calculation of these metrics are also addressed. Additionally, this review acknowledges the intricate interdependencies between power distribution systems and critical infrastructures, including information and communication technology, transportation, water distribution, and natural gas networks. It is important to understand these interdependencies and their impact on power distribution system resilience. Moreover, this work provides an in-depth analysis of existing research on planning solutions to enhance distribution system resilience and support power distribution system operators and planners in developing effective mitigation strategies. These strategies are crucial for minimizing the adverse impacts of extreme weather events and fostering overall resilience within power distribution systems.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures, submitted for review to Renewable and Sustainable Energy Review

A Study on Sensor System Latency in VR Motion Sickness

One of the most frequent technical factors affecting Virtual Reality (VR) performance and causing motion sickness is system latency. In this paper, we adopted predictive algorithms (i.e., Dead Reckoning, Kalman Filtering, and Deep Learning algorithms) to reduce the system latency. Cubic, quadratic, and linear functions are used to predict and curve fitting for the Dead Reckoning and Kalman Filtering algorithms. We propose a time series-based LSTM (long short-term memory), Bidirectional LSTM, and Convolutional LSTM to predict the head and body motion and reduce the motion to photon latency in VR devices. The error between the predicted data and the actual data is compared for statistical methods and deep learning techniques. The Kalman Filtering method is suitable for predicting since it is quicker to predict; however, the error is relatively high. However, the error property is good for the Dead Reckoning algorithm, even though the curve fitting is not satisfactory compared to Kalman Filtering. To overcome this poor performance, we adopted deep-learning-based LSTM for prediction. The LSTM showed improved performance when compared to the Dead Reckoning and Kalman Filtering algorithm. The simulation results suggest that the deep learning techniques outperformed the statistical methods in terms of error comparison. Overall, Convolutional LSTM outperformed the other deep learning techniques (much better than LSTM and Bidirectional LSTM) in terms of error

Development of a Cognitive Digital Twin for Pavement Infrastructure Health Monitoring

A road network is the key foundation of any nation’s critical infrastructure. Pavements represent one of the longest-living structures, having a post-construction life of 20–40 years. Currently, most attempts at maintaining and repairing these structures are performed in a reactive and traditional fashion. Recent advances in technology and research have proposed the implementation of costly measures and time-intensive techniques. This research presents a novel automated approach to develop a cognitive twin of a pavement structure by implementing advanced modelling and machine learning techniques from unmanned aerial vehicle (e.g., drone) acquired data. The research established how the twin is initially developed and subsequently capable of detecting current damage on the pavement structure. The proposed method is also compared to the traditional approach of evaluating pavement condition as well as the more advanced method of employing a specialized diagnosis vehicle. This study demonstrated an efficiency enhancement of maintaining pavement infrastructure

Evaluation of occupational health management status and safety issues of the small-scale fisheries sector in Bangladesh

Background: Small-scale fishing is one of the most precarious occupations, with high rates of threats and hazards. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the health hazards and safety issues of fishers involved in small-scale fisheries (SSF).Materials and methods: Fifty SSF fishers (n = 50) were surveyed by using a pre-tested questionnaire between October 2019 and March 2020 at the lower Meghna River in the northern tip of the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh.Results: Results revealed that 56% of SSF fishermen belong to a nuclear family, and 42% completed primary education. Forty per cent had an annual income of between 1,000 and 1,500 USD. Seventy-six per cent of fishermen were found to suffer from fever, and 72%, and 60% from diarrhoea and skin diseases over the last 5 years (2015–2020), respectively. During fishing, 78% of fishermen also suffered from red-eye problems, dizziness, and headache, and 68% struggled with musculoskeletal complaints during the last 5 years. Extreme cyclonic occurrences and sudden storms were experienced by 66% and 32% of fishermen, respectively, during the last 5 years. Local pharmacies were visited by 46% of fishermen for treatment due to ease of access. Sixty-four per cent of participants applied their local indigenous knowledge to treat health-related problems. Twenty-eight per cent and 32% of fishermen used a first aid box and stored medicine on board, respectively.Conclusions: Most of the fishers are in great risk of medium- to high-range danger while fishing in the SSF sector in Bangladesh. Many countries have developed protocols for safe and responsible fishing. In Bangladesh, adequate attention is needed for the sustainable development of the SSF sector

Industry 4.0 Applications for Medical/Healthcare Services

At present, the whole world is transitioning to the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, representing the transition to digital, fully automated environments, and cyber-physical systems. Industry 4.0 comprises many different technologies and innovations, which are being implemented in many different sectors. In this review, we focus on the healthcare or medical domain, where healthcare is being revolutionized. The whole ecosystem is moving towards Healthcare 4.0, through the application of Industry 4.0 methodologies. Many technical and innovative approaches have had an impact on moving the sector towards the 4.0 paradigm. We focus on such technologies, including Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics, blockchain, Cloud Computing, and Artificial Intelligence, implemented in Healthcare 4.0. In this review, we analyze and identify how their applications function, the currently available state-of-the-art technologies, solutions to current challenges, and innovative start-ups that have impacted healthcare, with regards to the Industry 4.0 paradigm

Detecting SARS-CoV-2 From Chest X-Ray Using Artificial Intelligence

Chest radiographs (X-rays) combined with Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) methods have been demonstrated to detect and diagnose the onset of COVID-19, the disease caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). However, questions remain regarding the accuracy of those methods as they are often challenged by limited datasets, performance legitimacy on imbalanced data, and have their results typically reported without proper confidence intervals. Considering the opportunity to address these issues, in this study, we propose and test six modified deep learning models, including VGG16, InceptionResNetV2, ResNet50, MobileNetV2, ResNet101, and VGG19 to detect SARS-CoV-2 infection from chest X-ray images. Results are evaluated in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and f- score using a small and balanced dataset (Study One), and a larger and imbalanced dataset (Study Two). With 95% confidence interval, VGG16 and MobileNetV2 show that, on both datasets, the model could identify patients with COVID-19 symptoms with an accuracy of up to 100%. We also present a pilot test of VGG16 models on a multi-class dataset, showing promising results by achieving 91% accuracy in detecting COVID-19, normal, and Pneumonia patients. Furthermore, we demonstrated that poorly performing models in Study One (ResNet50 and ResNet101) had their accuracy rise from 70% to 93% once trained with the comparatively larger dataset of Study Two. Still, models like InceptionResNetV2 and VGG19's demonstrated an accuracy of 97% on both datasets, which posits the effectiveness of our proposed methods, ultimately presenting a reasonable and accessible alternative to identify patients with COVID-19