CONGO²: Scalable Online Anomaly Detection and Localization in Power Electronics Networks

Rapid and accurate detection and localization of electronic disturbances simultaneously are important for preventing its potential damages and determining potential remedies. The existing anomaly detection methods are severely limited by the low accuracy, expensive computational cost, and the need for highly trained personnel. There is an urgent need for a scalable online algorithm for the in-field analysis of large-scale power electronics networks. In this article, we propose a fast and accurate algorithm for anomaly detection and localization of power electronics networks: the stratified colored-node graph (CONGO). This algorithm hierarchically models the change of correlated waveforms and then correlated sensors using the CONGO. By aggregating the change of each sensor with its neighbors’ inputs, we can spontaneously identify and localize the anomaly that cannot be detected by data collected from a single sensor. As our proposed method only focuses on the changes within a short time frame, it is highly computational efficient and only needs small data storage. Thus, our method is ideal for online and reliable anomaly detection and localization of large-scale power electronic networks. Compared to the existing anomaly detection methods, our method is entirely data driven without training data, highly accurate and reliable for wide-spectrum anomalies detection, and more importantly, capable of both detection and localization. Thus, it is ideal for the in-field deployment for large-scale power electronic networks. As illustrated by a distributed energy resources (DERs) power grid with 37-node, our method can effectively detect and localize various cyber and physical attacks.