An Attack-Resilient Cooperative Control Strategy of Multiple Distributed Generators in Distribution Networks

Distributed generators (DGs) have been developing rapidly in power systems. Motivated by their intrinsic distributed nature, distributed cooperative control based upon local communication recently emerge as a preferred strategy. For instance, a cooperative power control strategy can regulate the active power from a cluster of DGs at a certain ratio of its maximal available power according to a dispatch command. However, such a networked control system is susceptible to both communication failure and cyber-attack, e.g., denial-of-service attack and deceptive attack. To address this potential problem, an attack-resilient cooperative control strategy is proposed in this paper. With a properly designed observation network, each DG can monitor the behaviors of all its in-neighbors, and gradually isolate the misbehaving DGs (when present) from the network as long as they do not collude with each other. Consequently, even certain DGs misbehave, the rest of them can together accomplish the control objective provided that the remaining communication network is still connected. Simulations of the IEEE standard 34-bus test feeder demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed strategy.