Admittance-Guided Inverter Dispatch Command Manipulation Attack: A Grid Stability-Oriented Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel cyber-attack framework targeting inverter dispatch commands in microgrids, using admittance reconstruction and stability optimization to identify vulnerabilities and induce severe oscillations.

Contribution

It introduces an admittance-guided approach combining neural networks and optimization to find the most destabilizing inverter commands without requiring detailed system knowledge.

Findings

The attack can induce severe sub-synchronous oscillations within nominal dispatch bounds.

The proposed method accurately reconstructs inverter admittance for vulnerability assessment.

Hardware-in-the-loop experiments validate the effectiveness of the attack strategy.

Abstract

The high penetration of voltage source converters in modern smart microgrids enhances operational flexibility while introducing complex cyber-physical vulnerabilities. Existing cyber-attack studies either require detailed knowledge of system topology and controller dynamics or depend on repeated online interactions, which may compromise practicality by generating operationally infeasible or limit-violating commands. This article investigates a dispatch command manipulation attack and develops an admittance-guided framework to identify the vulnerable inverter and the worst-case dispatch command that most severely degrades system stability. A compromised inverter is utilized to inject controlled harmonic perturbations for sparse admittance measurement, and a physics-informed neural network is then employed to reconstruct the operating-point-dependent admittance of target inverters over the feasible dispatch region. Based on the reconstructed admittance, a stability-margin-oriented optimization is formulated to locate the most vulnerable inverter and the corresponding worst-case dispatch command. Controller hardware-in-the-loop experiments on a five-inverter microgrid demonstrate that the identified command can drive the system into severe sub-synchronous oscillations while remaining within nominal dispatch bounds, highlighting the need for stability-aware command screening beyond static limit checking.