A Distributed Malicious Agent Detection Scheme for Resilient Power Apportioning in Microgrids

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed detection scheme for malicious DERs in power networks, enhancing the resilience of power apportioning for ancillary services through a novel framework tested on a real-world experimental setup.

Contribution

It introduces a new distributed detection method for malicious DERs and integrates it with power apportioning to improve resilience in power network management.

Findings

Effective detection of malicious DERs demonstrated in experiments.

Resilient power apportioning improves ancillary service dispatch.

Framework applicable to diverse DERs and loads.

Abstract

We consider the framework of distributed aggregation of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) in power networks to provide ancillary services to the power grid. Existing aggregation schemes work under the assumption of trust and honest behavior of the DERs and can suffer when that is not the case. In this article, we develop a distributed detection scheme that allows the DERs to detect and isolate the maliciously behaving DERs. We propose a model for the maliciously behaving DERs and show that the proposed distributed scheme leads to the detection of the malicious DERs. Further, augmented with the distributed power apportioning algorithm the proposed scheme provides a framework for resilient distributed power apportioning for ancillary service dispatch in power networks. A controller-hardware-in-the-loop (CHIL) experimental setup is developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed resilient distributed power apportioning scheme on an 8-commercial building distribution network (Central Core) connected to a 55 bus distribution network (External Power Network) based on the University of Minnesota Campus. A diversity of DERs and loads are included in the network to generalize the applicability of the framework. The experimental results corroborate the efficacy of the proposed resilient distributed power apportioning for ancillary service dispatch in power networks.