Preserving microgrid sustainability through robust islanding detection scheme ensuring cyber-situational awareness

Along with the numerous environmental and operational benefits of renewable energy sources (RESs) integration into modern distribution networks, maintaining system security in these networks during challenging phenomena, especially unintentional islanding can still be problematic in some cases. This paper puts forward a sensitivity-based islanding detection algorithm that utilizes the transient kinetic energy of the RESs to identify the islanding condition in microgrids and also considers cyber-attacks, which may lead to operators making inappropriate operational choices. To be specific, the proposed algorithm finds a generalized index that considers simultaneously the impact of volatility of parameters during islanding and non-islanding conditions and is also robust against data integrity attacks. The generalized index, the so-called sensitivity islanding detection (SID) index, is designed based on the sensitivity of transient kinetic energy over transient influential parameters. Furthermore, a statistical index for islanding detection is introduced based on the standard variation that effectively monitors the volatilities. An unsupervised anomaly detection method that uses kernel density estimation technology and statistical calculations are proposed as a way to find cyber-attacks. Following that, an outlier detection method is used to identify anomalies. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated under various conditions using simulation environments.