Anomaly Detection in a Smart Microgrid System Using Cyber-Analytics: A Case Study

Smart microgrids are being increasingly deployed within the Department of Defense. The microgrid at Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Miramar is one such deployment that has fostered the integration of different technologies, including 5G and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). The objective of this paper is to develop an anomaly detection framework for the smart microgrid system at MCAS Miramar to enhance its cyber-resilience. We implement predictive analytics using machine learning to deal with cyber-uncertainties and threats within the microgrid environment. An autoencoder neural network is implemented to classify and identify specific cyber-attacks against this infrastructure. Both network traffic in the form of packet captures (PCAP) and time series data (from the AMI sensors) are considered. We train the autoencoder model on three traffic data sets: (1) Modbus TCP/IP PCAP data from the hardwired network apparatus of the smart microgrid, (2) experimentally generated 5G PCAP data that mimic traffic on the smart microgrid and (3) AMI smart meter sensor data provided by the Naval Facilities (NAVFAC) Engineering Systems Command. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and false data injection attacks (FDIA) are synthetically generated. We show the effectiveness of the autoencoder on detecting and classifying these types of attacks in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F-scores.