Optimal placement of PMU and PDC in power systems by considering the vulnerabilities against cyber-attacks

One of the most prevalent and destructive types of cyber-attacks on power systems is the false data injection (FDI) attack. In a false data injection attack, the attacker inflicts large damages on the network by manipulating the measurements. The pivotal solution to opposing this type of cyber-attack is to use phasor measurement units (PMUs). In this paper, a new method is presented to confront the FDI attack by using the optimal placement of PMU instruments. In the proposed algorithm at the beginning, all PMUs placements that achieve network observability are determined using the tabu search (TS) algorithm. Then, from the observable placement vectors, the placements that minimize the possibility of a cyber-attack on the network is identified. For this purpose, a new attack criterion is presented, which is obtained from the adversary strategy in the attack scheme. Since the measurements obtained from the PMUs must be transferred to a phasor data concentrator (PDC) center, the PDC placement also must be determined. In this paper, the optimal placement of PDC is presented by considering the cost of communication infrastructure, because the cost of communication infrastructure between PMUs and PDC is significant. For this purpose, we have used the Kruskal algorithm. The simulations performed on the IEEE 30-bus and 118-bus test system confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method for opposing cyber-attacks and reducing the cost of communication infrastructure.