Cyber Vulnerabilities on Agent-based Smart Grid Protection System

Abstract

This paper presents an innovative approach to identify potential impacts of cyber attacks on agent-based smart grid protection relays. An agent-based protection framework is developed, where an attacker may injects a malicious breaker trip command to the relay settings. This could cause unintentional tripping of CBs, even if there is no physical disturbance on the system. It results a healthy line of smart grids to be out-of-service that leads cascading failures. An algorithm is proposed to identify such kind of attack generated latency caused by unexpected malicious trip command. Using this algorithm agents can check the breaker statuses to ensure which line is out-of-service due to unintentional tripping. Furthermore, the proposed technique will be able to distinguish cyber attacks from faults on the system.