The increased rate of cyber-attacks on the power system necessitates the need for innovative solutions to ensure its resiliency. This work builds on the advancement in the IoT to provide a practical framework that is able to respond to multiple attacks on a network of interconnected microgrids. This paper provides an IoT-based digital twin (DT) of the cyber-physical system that interacts with the control system to ensure its proper operation. The IoT cloud provision of the energy cyber-physical and the DT are mathematically formulated. Unlike other cybersecurity frameworks in the literature, the proposed one can mitigate an individual as well as coordinated attacks. The framework is tested on a distributed control system and the security measures are implemented using cloud computing. The physical controllers are implemented using single-board computers. The practical results show that the proposed DT is able to mitigate the coordinated false data injection and the denial of service cyber-attacks.

With the emergence of distributed energy resources (DERs), with their associated communication and control complexities, there is a need for an efficient platform that can digest all the incoming data and ensure the reliable operation of the power system. The digital twin (DT) is a new concept that can unleash tremendous opportunities and can be used at the different control and security levels of power systems. This paper provides a methodology for the modelling of the implementation of energy cyber-physical systems (ECPSs) that can be used for multiple applications. Two DT types are introduced to cover the high-bandwidth and the low-bandwidth applications that need centric oversight decision making. The concept of the digital twin is validated and tested using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a cloud host that can incorporate physical and data models as well as being able to receive live measurements from the different actual power and control entities. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the real-time implementation of the DT for the ECPS based on internet of things (IoT) and cloud computing technologies. The normalized mean-square error for the low-bandwidth DT case was 3.7%. In the case of a high-bandwidth DT, the proposed method showed superior performance in reconstructing the voltage estimates, with 98.2% accuracy from only the controllers’ states.

The smart grid energy management with variable renewable energy resources presents many challenges to the grid operation. An optimized solution to manage the available resources is necessary to achieve reliable operation. This paper presents the Hierarchical Distributed Model Predictive Control (HDMPC) to solve the energy management problem in multi-time frame and multi-layer optimization strategy. The HDMPC combines the concept of enabling the optimization over long time-horizon for a centralized Supervisory Management (SM) layer and another short time-horizon during high power variability for a distributed Coordination Management (CM) layer. The information exchange and interoperability between different layers are provided through the data-centric communication approach. The SM (upper layer) works to present the grid operator with certain operational plans and gives the guidelines to the CM (lower layer). The CM has the responsibility to coordinate the relationship between the centralized optimization objectives and the physical power system layer. The proposed HDMPC control was verified both numerically as well as experimentally. The obtained simulation results show that the control strategy proposed here is successful and combines the benefits of both the centralized and distributed control for a global solution of the grid operation problem. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the real-time implementation of the proposed system for deployment to control future smart grid assets.