IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Magazine - April 2022 - 28

attempts to mislead the designed
heuristic approaches with fake price
information, both of the designed
algorithms perform robustly against
these attacks, providing a similar
performance to the case without
active management.
Conclusion: Cyberattacks
and Future Power Systems
Modern power systems (MPSs) have
added flexibility and coordination by
utilizing information and communication
technologies and AMI. MPSs
For researchers and industry
How MPSs will
deal with such
cyberattacks in
the future will be
critical to ensure
their stability and
performance.
have now gradually transitioned into a complex cyberphysical
energy system (CPES). The cyber layer has made it
possible for MPSs to not only become more responsive to
faults and other systemic problems but also coordinate
production and load energy by reacting faster and smarter
to changes. Moreover, individual households are
empowered to install HEMSs to manage their own production
and load as well as interactions with the power
system. The efficient transformation of an MPS into
a CPES is doubly important today because global
climate change issues have made it necessary to integrate
large amounts of RESs into the power system.
However, this transformation comes with a price:
vulnerability to cyberattacks. MPS control and operations
are more visible to external actors, and the strong
interactions between the cyberphysical layers in a
CPES increase the MPS's vulnerability to cyberattacks.
Moreover, power electronic converters, which are key
enablers for integrating RESs into MPSs, are typically
controlled by employing a hierarchical three-stage
structure, namely, primary, secondary, and tertiary layers.
This means that the MPSs have additional vulnerabilities
and possible attack points in different layers of
the system. A cyberattacker can take advantage of any
software flaws or failures in any layer of the CPES and
create harmful disturbances in the system.
How MPSs will deal with such cyberattacks in the
future will be critical to ensure their stability and
performance. Advanced and resilient technologies
and mitigation measures have to be developed and
implemented at every level. Hierarchical stages in MPSs
enforce different timescales of operation, giving great
flexibility to design mitigation techniques against
cyberattacks. At the same time, these measures can
also be cheated if the attacker has access to multiple
points to design coordinated attacks [33]. Data-driven
techniques are a computationally viable platform to
identify such anomalies. Robust and resilient control
strategies using watermarking [34] and state observers
[35] could be smartly employed to infiltrate such cyberattacks
in the primary and secondary control layer by
guaranteeing faster action.
28 IEEE SYSTEMS, MAN, & CYBERNETICS MAGAZINE April 2022
practitioners, the development of
countermeasures to mitigate the
impacts of cyberattacks, including
financial and data losses, privacy
invasions, and so on, is a
fascinating and highly relevant
area of investigation today. After
all, a safe and secure electrical
power system is an important
part of a safe and secure society.
Acknowledgments
This article is partly supported by
the Academy of Finland via EnergyNet Research Fellowship
321265/328869, and Framework for the Identification
of Rare Events via Machine Learning and IoT Networks
(326270; CHIST-ERA-17-BDSI-003). This research is also
supported by the joint Baltic-Nordic Energy Research programme
project " Guidelines for Next Generation Buildings
as Future Scalable Virtual Management of MicroGrids
[Next-uGrid] " (117766).
About the Authors
Hafiz Majid Hussain (majid.hussain@lut.fi) received his
B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the National
University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Pakistan,
in 2014 and M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the
University of Engineering and Technology Taxila, Pakistan,
in 2017. Currently, he is pursuing his Ph.D. degree in
electrical engineering from the Cyberphysical Systems
Group, Lappeenranta University of Technology, Lappeenranta,
53850, Finland. He is part of the project called
Building the Energy Internet as a Large-Scale Internet
of Things-Based Cyber physical System. His research
interests include demand response applications, energy
resource optimization in smart grids, and information
security technologies. For more information, see https://
sites.google.com/view/hafizmajidhussain/biography. He is
a Member of IEEE.
Arun Narayanan (arun.narayanan@lut.fi) received his
B.E. degree in electrical engineering from Visvesvaraya
National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India, in 2002
and M.Sc. degree in energy technology from Lappeenranta
University of Technology (LUT), Finland, in 2013.
He received his Ph.D. degree from the School of Energy
Systems, LUT. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow
with the Cyber-Physical Systems Group, LUT, Lappeenranta,
53850, Finland. His research interests include
renewable energy-based smart microgrids, electricity
markets, demand-side management, energy management
systems, and information and communications
technology. He focuses on applying optimization, computational
concepts, and artificial intelligence techniques
to renewable electrical energy problems. He is a
Member of IEEE.
https://sites.google.com/view/hafizmajidhussain/biography https://sites.google.com/view/hafizmajidhussain/biography
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