Review on Interpretable Machine Learning in Smart Grid

Big data analytics and artificial intelligence aspects for privacy and security concerns for demand response modelling in smart grid: A futuristic approach

Next generation electrical grid considered as Smart Grid has completely embarked a journey in the present electricity era. This creates a dominant need of machine learning approaches for security aspects at the larger scale for the electrical grid. The need of connectivity and complete communication in the system uses a large amount of data where the involvement of machine learning models with proper frameworks are required. This massive amount of data can be handled by various process of machine learning models by selecting appropriate set of consumers to respond in accordance with demand response modelling, learning the different attributes of the consumers, dynamic pricing schemes, various load forecasting and also data acquisition process with more cost effectiveness. In connected to this process, considering complex smart grid security and privacy based methods becomes a major aspect and there can be potential cyber threats for the consumers and also utility data. The security concerns related to machine learning model exhibits a key factor based on different machine learning algorithms used and needed for the energy application at a future perspective. This work exhibits as a detailed analysis with machine learning models which are considered as cyber physical system model with smart grid. This work also gives a clear understanding towards the potential advantages, limitations of the algorithms in a security aspect and outlines future direction in this very important area and fast-growing approach.

Security Baseline for Substation Automation Systems

The use of information technology and the automation of control systems in the energy sector enables a more efficient transmission and distribution of electricity. However, in addition to the many benefits that the deployment of intelligent and largely autonomous systems brings, it also carries risks associated with information and cyber security breaches. Technology systems form a specific and critical communication infrastructure, in which powerful control elements integrating IoT principles and IED devices are present. It also contains intelligent access control systems such as RTU, IDE, HMI, and SCADA systems that provide communication with the data and control center on the outer perimeter. Therefore, the key question is how to comprehensively protect these specialized systems and how to approach security implementation projects in this area. To establish rules, procedures, and techniques to ensure the cyber security of smart grid control systems in the energy sector, it is necessary to understand the security threats and bring appropriate measures to ensure the security of energy distribution. Given the use of a wide range of information and industrial technologies, it is difficult to protect energy distribution systems using standard constraints to protect common IT technologies and business processes. Therefore, as part of a comprehensive approach to cyber security, specifics such as legislative framework, technological constraints, international standards, specialized protocols or company processes, and many others need to be considered. Therefore, the key question is how to comprehensively protect these specialized systems and how to approach security implementation projects in this area. In this article, a basic security concept for control systems of power stations, which are part of the power transmission and distribution system, is presented based on the Smart Grid domain model with emphasis on substation intelligence, according to the Purdue model. The main contribution of the paper is the comprehensive design of mitigation measures divided into mandatory and recommended implementation based on the standards defined within the MITRE ATT&CK matrix specified, concerning the specifications of intelligent distribution substations. The proposed and industry-tested solution is mapped to meet the international security standards ISO 27001 and national legislation reflecting the requirements of NIS2. This ensures that the security requirements will be met when implementing the proposed Security Baseline.

Interpretable LSTM Based on Mixture Attention Mechanism for Multi-Step Residential Load Forecasting

Residential load forecasting is of great significance to improve the energy efficiency of smart home services. Deep-learning techniques, i.e., long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks, can considerably improve the performance of prediction models. However, these black-box networks are generally unexplainable, which creates an obstacle for the customer to deeply understand forecasting results and rapidly respond to uncertain circumstances, as practical engineering requires a high standard of prediction reliability. In this paper, an interpretable deep-learning method is proposed to solve the multi-step residential load forecasting problem which is referred to as explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). An encoder–decoder network architecture based on multi-variable LSTM (MV-LSTM) is developed for the multi-step probabilistic-load forecasting. The mixture attention mechanism is introduced in each prediction time step to better capture the different temporal dynamics of multivariate sequence in an interpretable form. By evaluating the contribution of each variable to the forecast, multi-quantile forecasts at multiple future time steps can be generated. The experiments on the real data set show that the proposed method can achieve good prediction performance while providing valuable explanations for the prediction results. The findings help end users gain insights into the forecasting model, bridging the gap between them and advanced deep-learning techniques.