On the Impact of Cyber-Attacks on Distributed Secondary Control of DC Microgrids

In recent years, cyber-attacks on communication links became an interesting research topic in various fields. In general, the aim of these attacks is to disrupt the system operation by corrupting the exchanged information, sever communication links, etc. Distributed control is an attractive alternative to centralized control, however, this control architecture is vulnerable to cyber-attacks due to exchange information between different units. In this paper, the impact of cyber-attacks on distributed control of DC microgrids is studied. Impact of three common attacks in microgrids i.e., controller hijacking, false data injection, and denial of service is evaluated. To do so, four secondary control methods proposed in the literature for achieving output voltage restoration and current sharing accuracy of DC microgrids are considered. In this work, the cyber-attacks impact on communication links are modeled. Using the models, vulnerability comparison of the secondary control methods against cyber-attacks is performed. A DC microgrid with three units is built in SIMULINK/MATLAB environment in order to make the comparison studies.