A Novel Cyberattack-Resilient Frequency Control Method for Interconnected Power Systems Using SMO-based Attack Estimation

Cyberattacks pose a significant threat to modern power systems due to the interaction of their physical components with information and communication technologies. A critical power system application that is directly affected by such malicious activities is the Load Frequency Control (LFC) system. The goal of the LFC is to maintain the power balance of the grid by sensing frequency deviations and regulating the output of the generators. In this paper, an innovative False Data Injection Attack (FDIA) estimation method is proposed for LFC along with an efficient cyberattack-resilient control design. The presented attack mitigation technique employs novel sliding mode techniques combined with an unknown input observer to estimate the launched FDIAs. Then, the estimated attack vector is used in the control loop to eliminate the cyberattack impact on LFC. The introduced method can tackle FDIAs that target both measurements and control signals and is resilient against external system disturbances. For the experiments, several real-world features of power systems are considered, such as nonlinearities, network delays, diverse types of tie-lines and multiple topologies of interconnected power regions, along with Hardware-in-the-Loop simulations for real-time assessment. The results verify the effectiveness and the feasibility of the proposed method, its scalability over various power systems and its superiority in comparison with other techniques.