Dr. Asrari - NSF recommendation for funding
April 19, 2023
On April 19, 2023, the Director of the Energy, Power, Control, and Networks program at the National Science Foundation, recommended funding Dr. Asrari’s Engineering Research Initiation proposal on remedial actions against cyberattacks on the power grid. The focus of the project is to address the following research question: “How to react to cyberattacks on load tap changing (LTC) mechanism of autotransformers within power distribution systems to tackle the intended voltage collapse”. Within this scope, the research's first objective is to investigate LTCs' vulnerability to cyberattacks targeting voltage collapse in distribution systems. Obtaining this objective as a prerequisite for distribution system operator will result in a sophisticated attack model, that bypasses state estimation-based bad data detection, based on which realistic remedial actions can be developed. The second objective is to design primary/backup reaction mechanisms to mitigate the voltage collapse caused by the attacked LTCs. To obtain this objective, several algorithms will be created to design a primary remediation technique based on distribution network reconfiguration customized by a deep learning framework. The primary reaction scheme will be supported by a backup electricity market-based mechanism, where distributed synchronous generators will optimally contribute to the mitigation of cyberattacks in the regions of the system not fully alleviated by the network reconfiguration. Finally, the third objective of this research is to perform hardware-in-the-loop experimental validation of the proposed remedial actions on a lab-scale smart microgrid.