Mitigation of Intrusions to ACE Signals in Power System Networks

Heavy reliance of automatic generation control (AGC) on the communication and interactive technologies makes the system more susceptible to cyber-attacks. An adversary can introduce false data injection (FDI) attacks to corrupt the network parameters in the communication channel causing wrong dispatches leading to the power disruptions. Particularly, the vulnerability of the deployed sensors and the weak protocols employed for information exchange might land at the hands of cyber-attackers. A lot of studies has been conducted to detect such cyber-hackings; however, less effort has been yielded to develop strategies to mitigate such adversaries. Therefore, considering the grid security, the paper presents two new novel schemes for attack mitigation for secure operation. Firstly, a new mitigation method is proposed by generating ACE-like signals incorporating the knowledge of bilateral contracts between players and the synchrophasor infrastructure. However, in situations where synchrophasor technology is not available, another mitigation method is presented in this paper by estimating the ACE signal in an offline AGC platform. A three-area model is considered to verify the potential of the proposed mitigation schemes. The obtained dynamic responses verify the efficacy of the proposed schemes. Later the results are scrutinized against satisfaction of NERC's control performance standards.