Anomaly Detection in Power Grids via Context-Agnostic Learning (2404.07898v1)

Abstract: An important tool grid operators use to safeguard against failures, whether naturally occurring or malicious, involves detecting anomalies in the power system SCADA data. In this paper, we aim to solve a real-time anomaly detection problem. Given time-series measurement values coming from a fixed set of sensors on the grid, can we identify anomalies in the network topology or measurement data? Existing methods, primarily optimization-based, mostly use only a single snapshot of the measurement values and do not scale well with the network size. Recent data-driven ML techniques have shown promise by using a combination of current and historical data for anomaly detection but generally do not consider physical attributes like the impact of topology or load/generation changes on sensor measurements and thus cannot accommodate regular context-variability in the historical data. To address this gap, we propose a novel context-aware anomaly detection algorithm, GridCAL, that considers the effect of regular topology and load/generation changes. This algorithm converts the real-time power flow measurements to context-agnostic values, which allows us to analyze measurement coming from different grid contexts in an aggregate fashion, enabling us to derive a unified statistical model that becomes the basis of anomaly detection. Through numerical simulations on networks up to 2383 nodes, we show that our approach is accurate, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches, and is computationally efficient.