Ph.D. Student Mitchell Easley received the prestigious best paper award

Ph.D. Student Mitchell Easley received the prestigious best paper award from 2019 IEEE Technologies on Homeland Security Conference organized by MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Raytheon for his paper co-authored with Ph.D. student Amin Y. Fard and Dr. Mohammad Shadmand on cyber-security analytics of power distribution system using Smart Inverters. The external PEAS group collaborators on this work are Dr. George T. Amariucai from Computer Science Department at KSU and Dr. Haitham Abu-Rub from Texas A&M at Qatar.

Paper title: Cybersecurity Analytics using Smart Inverters in Power Distribution System: Proactive Intrusion Detection and Corrective Control Framework

This paper proposes an autonomous detection and corrective control framework consisting of two algorithms to identify anomalies and provide a corrective action on the distribution system using smart inverters. The proposed framework detects the inverter abnormal behaviors and identifies them as cyber-physical attack or internal failure of the inverter. A model predictive control (MPC) scheme is proposed to detect the inverter internal failure. In the case of inverter failure, the proposed MPC scheme adopts corrective actions to restore the inverter operation with a pre-defined power injection set-points. Additionally, this paper proposes a cyber-physical attack detection mechanism, based on measurements from a geographic community of smart devices. The proposed framework continuously assists the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system to differentiate anomalies on the distribution system and decide the appropriate control actions for the entire grid.