2023/09/19 by Ahmad Mohammad Saber, Amr Youssef, Saber, Ahmad Mohammad +7
Engineering · #FOS: Electrical engineering #Islanding Detection in Power Systems #Microgrid Control and Optimization #Optimal Power Flow Distribution #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2309.10304
openalex publication_date 2023/09/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Distributed Volt-Var Control (VVC) is a widely used control mode of smart inverters. However, necessary VVC curve parameters are remotely communicated to the smart inverter, which opens doors for cyberattacks. If the VVC curves of an inverter are maliciously manipulated, the attacked inverter's reactive power injection will oscillate, causing undesirable voltage oscillations to manifest in the distribution system, which, in turn, threatens the system's stability. In contrast with previous works that proposed methods to mitigate the oscillations after they are already present in the system, this paper presents an intrusion detection method to detect malicious VVC curves once they are communicated to the inverter. The proposed method utilizes a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) that is trained on features extracted from only the local measurements of the inverter. After a smart inverter is equipped with the proposed method, any communicated VVC curve will be verified by the MLP once received. If the curve is found to be malicious, it will be rejected, thus preventing unwanted oscillations beforehand. Otherwise, legitimate curves will be permitted. The performance of the proposed scheme is verified using the 9-bus Canadian urban benchmark distribution system simulated in PSCAD/EMTDC environment. Our results show that the proposed solution can accurately detect malicious VVC curves.