Dynamical Failures Driven by False Load Injection Attacks Against Smart Grid

Extensive studies have revealed that smart grid is vulnerable to cyber-physical attacks. However, these strategies only focus on the cascading initiation phase to induce single-stage failures with multiple branch tripping, lacking of exploring the attack effectiveness in the propagation phase so that the deeply-hidden cascading failures are underestimated. In this paper, we propose a novel false load injection attack strategy that can intentionally penetrate into the cascading propagation phase to drive multi-stage dynamical failures with a cascading process. Specifically, we formulate a bi-level optimization problem to model the adversarial game between operator and attacker. The former is in charge of security-constrained economic dispatching to minimize the generation cost, and the latter aims to maximize the cumulative number of tripped branches. Further, we reformulate this NP-hard bi-level problem as a mixed integer linear program for tractable computation. Finally, we perform numerical simulations on different-scale IEEE test systems to validate our strategy in driving the dynamical failures.