Decentralized Intrusion Prevention (DIP) Against Co-Ordinated Cyberattacks on Distribution Automation Systems

Integration of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) into the distribution system makes today's power grid more remotely monitored and controlled than it has been. The fast increasing connectivity, however, also implies that the distribution grid today, or smart grid, is more vulnerable. Thus, research into intrusion/anomaly detection systems at the distribution level is in critical need. Current research on Intrusion Detection Systems for the power grid has been focused primarily on cyber security at the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition, and single node levels with little attention on coordinated cyberattacks at multiple nodes. A holistic approach toward system-wide cyber security for distribution systems is yet to be developed. This paper presents a novel approach toward intrusion prevention, using a multi-agent system, at the distribution system level. Simulations of the method have been performed on the IEEE 13-Node Test Feeder, and the results compared to those obtained from existing methods. The results have validated the performance of the proposed method for protection against cyber intrusions at the distribution system level.