Cibersegurança e Resiliência de Microrredes DC

The project proposal presented herein defines as general objective the promotion of novel technologies to accomplish cybersecurity in DC microgrids. The project implementation seeks to address the following specific objectives: i) identify the DC microgrid components whose functions are particularly compromised by attacks; ii) improve the capability to detect cyberattacks, distinguishing these disruptions from components faults; iii) recover the control and functionality of DC microgrids components, when their normal operation becomes compromised by intrusions. Electricity plays a vital role in all activity sectors. Thus, any developments taken towards security in energy supply are particularly welcome, since perturbances in energy supply may present serious safety and economical damages. Faults and cyberattacks are indeed two important types of disruptions that compromise the effectiveness of DC microgrids. At the same time, faults and cyberattacks differ with regards to their root causes. While faults in DC microgrids components represent internal system disruptions, cyberattacks represent an external source of disruption, whose signatures are unknown to the system. This difficulty in establishing a relation between cyberattacks and specific signatures hence complicates the process of cybersecurity in DC microgrids. Cyberthreats are a relatively new paradigm registering exponential growth, particularly within the context of trending small-scale energy distribution systems (i.e. DC microgrids). Given the limited scale and robustness of DC microgrids, disruptions on a single microgrid component, induced by cyberattacks, can easily scale up to a point where the entire DC microgrid becomes inoperative, leading to blackouts. Besides avoiding blackouts, the protection against cyberattacks can also avoid data theft. At present, there are no guidelines on what measures to adopt for accomplishing cybersecurity in DC microgrids. The literature review suggests that the adoption of measures for cybersecurity applied to energy distribution systems remains fairly underdeveloped, with attention being placed solely on large-scale systems, namely high-voltage high-power AC energy systems and their individual components.