Mitigating Voltage Violations in Smart City Microgrids Under Coordinated False Data Injection Cyberattacks: Simulation and Experimental Insights

This article investigates the impacts of coordinated false data injection attacks (FDIAs) on voltage profiles in smart microgrids integrated with renewable-based distributed energy resources (DERs), a critical component of urban energy infrastructure in smart cities. By leveraging simulation and experimental methods, a coordinated framework is developed for understanding and mitigating these threats, ensuring the stability of renewable-based DERs integral to modern urban systems. In the examined framework, a team of attackers independently identify the optimal times of two different cyberattacks leading to undervoltage and overvoltage in a smart microgrid. The objective function of each model is to increase the voltage violation in the form of either overvoltage or undervoltage caused by the corresponding FDIA. In such a framework, the attackers design a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP) simultaneously resulting in voltage violations in the most vulnerable regions of the targeted microgrid. Considering the conflict between objective functions in the developed MOOP, a Pareto-based solution methodology is utilized to obtain a set of optimal solutions, called non-dominated solutions, as well as the best compromise solution (BCS). The effectiveness of the unified FDIA is verified based on simulation and experimental validations. In this regard, the IEEE 13-node test feeder has been modified as a microgrid for the simulation analysis, whereas the experimental validation has been performed on a lab-scale hybrid PV/wind microgrid containing renewable energy resources.