Cyber-Physical Testbed for Distributed Consensus Control Amid Denial of Service Attacks

AC microgrids (MGs) are exposed to communication disturbances and malicious cyber-attacks due to the sparse communication network. In this work, a controller hardware-in-the-loop (C-HIL) setup is designed to test the effect of communication disturbances and different types of cyber-attacks by proposing a secondary controller utilizing distributed consensus scheme for a multi-agent system (MAS). The proposed MG cyber-physical system (CPS) includes, an islanded AC MG modeled and run in OPAL-RT, secondary agents implemented on external controllers, and an attacker agent. UDP/IP communication protocol is used to facilitate communication between OPAL-RT and the controller agents, as well as neighboring agents. The study highlights the risk AC MGs are exposed to under denial-of-service (DoS) cyber-attacks. The impacts of DoS attacks on the closed-loop stability of the AC MG are analyzed comprehensively. The experiments emphasize the severe impact of DoS attacks on the controlled system and the necessity to implement detection and mitigation measures to ensure the stability and reliability of microgrids.