Coordinated Topology Attacks in Smart Grid Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

In this article, we investigate the coordinated topology attacks in smart grid, which combine a physical topology attack and a cyber-topology attack. The physical attack first trips a transmission line. In order to deceive the control center, the attacker masks the outage signal of the tripped line in the cyber layer and then creates a fake outage signal for another transmission line. The goal of coordinated topology attacks is to overload a critical line (different from the physical tripped line and the fake outage line) by misleading the control center into making improper dispatch. In order to determine the attack strategy, we propose a deep-reinforcement-learning-based method to identify the physical tripped line and the fake outage line. Besides, in order to block the outage signal of the tripped line and create the fake outage signal with limited attack resources, we propose a deep-reinforcement-learning-based approach to determine the minimal attack resources. Numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.