A Power-Communication Co-Simulation Platform for Real-Time Microgrid Cyber Security Analysis

The rapid digitalisation process in power system has greatly benefited the large-scale integration of distributed energy resources (DERs), essentially accelerating the progress towards net zero. However, numerous cyber attacks such as false data injection (FDI) attacks are impeding the normal control and operation activities. This paper aims to establish a real-time microgrid co-simulation platform to fully study the impacts of realistic attack events on micorgrid's control performance. Although there exist a large number of power-communication co-simulation platforms for the power system, they are designed to mainly provide validation services for control and operation algorithms and little attention has been paid to the cyber security. In the established microgrid platform, power and communication parts are simulated in Typhoon Hardware-in-the-loop(HIL) 602+ and EXata Network Simulator, respectively, and a dedicated synchronisation scheme is developed and embedded in Raspberry Pis to achieve master-slave data exchange between them. Based on the advanced cyber libraries provided by EXata, realistic FDI and packet drop attacks are mounted against the mapped communication links within EXata. The results indicate that these cyber attacks can severely influence the microgrid control performance including destabilising system states and specific state deviations, further demonstrating the necessity of deploying effective cyber-resilience enhancement mechanisms.