Real-Time Detection of False Readings in Smart Grid AMI Using Deep and Ensemble Learning

In the advanced metering infrastructure, smart meters are deployed at the consumers’ side to regularly transmit fine-grained electricity consumption readings to the system operator (SO) for billing and real-time load monitoring and energy management. However, fraudulent consumers may compromise their meters to launch electricity-theft cyberattacks by reporting low-consumption readings to reduce their bills. These false readings not only cause financial losses but also degrade the grid’s performance because they are used for energy management and load estimate. The existing solutions in the literature focus only on securing the billing, so they are not designed to detect the attacks in real time, and thus the SO may use false readings for a long period of time in load monitoring and energy management until they are identified. In this paper, we propose a general ensemble-based deep-learning detector that enables the SO to detect false readings in real time. To do that, we first train several deep learning models on samples generated from a sliding window of the readings. Then, we use the best-performing model to train several models on different ratios of false readings and use them in our ensemble-based detector. Extensive experiments are conducted, and the results indicate that comparing to the literature, our detector can detect the false readings after sending a few false readings (around 15) comparing to the existing daily and weekly detection approaches that need 144 and 1,008 readings, respectively.