Resilience Against Data Manipulation in Distributed Synchrophasor-Based Mode Estimation

Abstract

Generators are critical components of electrical grids and have to operate synchronously. Unfortunately, faults in power grids can cause significant electro-mechanical oscillations. A number of methods to estimate these electro-mechanical oscillation modes have been proposed in the literature. With the advent of synchrophasors which enable real-time measurements over a wide-area, and in keeping with a trend towards more distributed monitoring and control applications (e.g., WAMPAC), measurement-based methods to estimate oscillation modes in a distributed manner have been proposed. Like other power system applications these distributed mode estimation approaches also face the prospect of false data injection attacks. In this paper, we introduce a mechanism, inspired by byzantine fault tolerance, for making distributed alternating direction of multipliers method of mode estimation resilient against data manipulation attacks. We evaluate our approach using IEEE 68-bus and 145-bus test systems under different attack scenarios and show that in all the scenarios considered our approach allows distributed mode estimation to converge well.