Spatio-temporal data-driven detection of false data injection attacks in power distribution systems

The utilization of distributed generation units (DG) in power distribution systems has increased the complexity of system monitoring and operation. Numerous information and communication technologies have been adopted recently to overcome the challenges and complexities associated with the integration of DG units in distribution systems. However, these technologies have created wide opportunities for energy theft and other types of cyber-physical threats. False data injection attacks (FDIA) illustrate a challenging threat for distribution systems for these are very tough to detect in reality. In this manuscript, we propose a spatio-temporal learning algorithm that is able to acquire the normal dynamics of distribution systems to overcome possible FDIA. First, we use a long short-term memory autoencoder (LSTM-AE) in acquiring the usual dynamics. After that, we employ the unsupervised trained model in detecting the numerous potentials of FDIAs in distribution systems by assessing the residual error of every measurement sample. This developed method is purely data-driven. This enables it to be robust to the distribution systems’ nonlinearities and uncertainties which overcomes the weaknesses of the proposed detection algorithms in the literature. The efficacy of the developed detection method is assessed via different test case scenarios with numerous basic and stealth FDIAs. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd