A Robust Distributed Economic Dispatch Strategy of Virtual Power Plant Under Cyber-Attacks

As distributed generators (DGs) rapidly integrate into current power systems, new methods to effectively manage them need to be developed. Toward this end, a large number of geographically dispersed DGs are generally aggregated into a virtual power plant (VPP). Then, distributed control schemes are used to achieve optimal economic dispatch of the VPP by maintaining equal incremental costs of DGs while the aggregated DG power matches the dispatch command. Often, one of the drawbacks of distributed schemes is that they are susceptible to communication failures and cyber-attacks (i.e., noncolluding and colluding attacks). In order to mitigate this problem, an attack-robust distributed economic dispatch strategy is proposed where we assume that every DG can monitor the behavior of its in-neighbors and has the network connectivity information. The proposed strategy detects the misbehaving DGs residing in the network and gradually isolates them so that the remaining well-behaving DGs could still accomplish the economic dispatch. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is illustrated through simulations on the IEEE 123-bus test system.