Impact Analysis of DoS attacks on Different MAS Control architectures in Cyber-Physical Testbed

Abstract

The constant integration of distributed energy re-sources (DER) and smart devices with advanced communication features have not only transformed the power grid into a cyber-physical system (CPS) but has also proven the constant risks associated with vulnerabilities from each of these devices. These changes in addition to the complex communication security of the power grid have resulted in the raise of cyberattacks on the power grid. Through this research, a CPS testbed with two different multi-agent systems (MAS) based secondary control architectures is developed in the real-time environment using RTDS to analyze the impact of different cyberattacks on the power systems. For the cyber layer implementation, multiple single-board computers (SBC) are used. With the help of an over-voltage relay in the Hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) setup, the physical impacts of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on both centralized and distributed control architectures are studied. The results have shown that the distributed MAS architecture is more resilient to the DoS attacks and the system has managed to reach stable operation even while under attack.