Paper #2 – RADM: A Risk-Aware DER Management Framework with Real-time DER Trustworthiness Evaluation

The increasing penetration level of distributed energy resources (DERs) substantially expands the attack surface of the modern power grid. By compromising DERs, adversaries are capable of destabilizing the grid and potentially causing large-area blackouts. Due to the limited administrative control over DERs, constrained computational capabilities, and possible physical accesses to DERs, current device level defenses are insufficient to defend against malicious attacks on DERs. To compensate the shortcomings of device level defenses, in this paper, we develop a system-level risk-aware DER management framework (RADM) to mitigate the attack impacts. We propose a metric, trust score, to dynamically evaluate the trustworthiness of DERs. The trust scores are initialized with offline trust scores derived from static information and then regularly updated with online trust scores derived from a physics-guided Gaussian Process Regressor using real-time data. The trust scores are integrated into the grid control decision making process by balancing the grid performance and the security risks. Extensive simulations are conducted to justify the effectiveness of the proposed method.