TY - JOUR
T1 - Manipulating Residents' Behavior to Attack the Urban Power Distribution System
AU - Raman, Gururaghav
AU - Peng, Jimmy Chih Hsien
AU - Rahwan, Talal
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received October 12, 2018; revised January 17, 2019; accepted March 2, 2019. Date of publication March 8, 2019; date of current version October 3, 2019. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore, under Grant NRF2018-SR2001-018. Paper no. TII-18-2676. (Corresponding author: Jimmy Chih-Hsien Peng.) G. Raman and J. C.-H. Peng are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117583 (e-mail:,[email protected]; [email protected]).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2005-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2019/10
Y1 - 2019/10
N2 - The reliable operation of the power distribution system is a matter of national security. Increasingly, urban distribution systems rely on communications between customers and the utility to implement consumer-centric programs such as demand response that enhance the grid resilience. This paper reports an unconventional and previously unexamined mode of malicious attack on the power distribution infrastructure of cities. It demonstrates that consumer behaviors in such a system could be manipulated by an attacker using false communications, which could significantly impact the system reliability. Using a novel decision-making model for consumer response, possible network impacts of such an attack are examined, which include reduction in system reserves, increase in peak demand, lower voltage profiles, and potential system blackouts. These detrimental effects are shown to worsen in the future as more consumers join such programs and adopt flexible high-power loads. Furthermore, though the system is resilient to random errors or failures, it remains highly vulnerable to strategic attacks such as those demonstrated here. These results recommend urgency in developing solutions to detect and tackle possible injection of fake information into such critical systems, which, as shown here, can have a very real impact on the energy infrastructure reliability.
AB - The reliable operation of the power distribution system is a matter of national security. Increasingly, urban distribution systems rely on communications between customers and the utility to implement consumer-centric programs such as demand response that enhance the grid resilience. This paper reports an unconventional and previously unexamined mode of malicious attack on the power distribution infrastructure of cities. It demonstrates that consumer behaviors in such a system could be manipulated by an attacker using false communications, which could significantly impact the system reliability. Using a novel decision-making model for consumer response, possible network impacts of such an attack are examined, which include reduction in system reserves, increase in peak demand, lower voltage profiles, and potential system blackouts. These detrimental effects are shown to worsen in the future as more consumers join such programs and adopt flexible high-power loads. Furthermore, though the system is resilient to random errors or failures, it remains highly vulnerable to strategic attacks such as those demonstrated here. These results recommend urgency in developing solutions to detect and tackle possible injection of fake information into such critical systems, which, as shown here, can have a very real impact on the energy infrastructure reliability.
KW - Behavioral demand response (DR)
KW - consumer behavior
KW - power system security
KW - vulnerability identification
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85073247744&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85073247744&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TII.2019.2903882
DO - 10.1109/TII.2019.2903882
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85073247744
SN - 1551-3203
VL - 15
SP - 5575
EP - 5587
JO - IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
JF - IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
IS - 10
M1 - 8663295
ER -