A Comprehensive Review on Cyber-Attack Detection and Control of Microgrid Systems

Due to the fast progress of Microgrid (MG) systems and the development of advanced computing technologies and communication networks—all of which enhance the efficiency and reliability of power networks—MGs are at the risk of various cyber-attacks which can eventually lead to different glitches in the power distribution networks. There are many different kinds of cyber-attacks, some of which are the False Data Injection Attack, Denial of Service, Stealth Attack, and Covert Attack. The common goals of these attacks are to cause power outage, economic loss, and even system instability. Cyber-attacks could infiltrate MGs through the communication links, local controllers, or master control channels. In this chapter, a thorough review of the types of cyber-attacks and the problems caused by them in MGs has been presented, and some methods of cyber-attack detection, resilient control system design, and countermeasures against such attacks have been discussed. Numerous research works have already investigated the subject of cyber-attacks on both the Direct-Current (DC) and Alternating-Current (AC) MG systems. These studies can be divided into two main categories: (a) detection and mitigation approaches, and (b) resilient control system designs. Several subclasses of each of these categories, along with their advantages and disadvantages has been thoroughly investigated in this chapter. In the first category, after detecting a compromised agent, an active or passive mitigation mechanism is activated to prevent the spread of the agent’s destructive effects to the whole system. This may impose some strict limitations on the MGs. In the second category, by developing the distributed attack-resilient control protocols, the resilience of a MG system against potential attacks/faults/noises is enhanced to the point where no detection and mitigation action will be required.