Quantum-Key-Distribution-Based Microgrid Control for Cybersecurity Enhancement

The integration of information and communication technologies has introduced cybersecurity challenges to microgrid (MG) apart from bringing more flexibility, reliability, and resilience. Especially in the upcoming quantum era, the existing cryptographic systems are vulnerable to attacks from quantum computers. Motivated by these challenges, this article proposes a quantum-key-distribution (QKD)-based MG distributed control framework for cybersecurity enhancement. To defend the side-channel attacks and make the framework practical enough for industrial applications, measurement-device-independent QKD (MDI-QKD) is introduced. The following contributions are made in this work. 1) A novel QKD-based quantum-secure control architecture is established to assure the data transmission security in MG distributed control. 2) MDI-QKD with asymmetric protocol is used to form a scalable QKD network for MG control. 3) A method for fast parameter optimization based on deep neural network (DNN) is proposed to adjust the parameters in QKD systems in real-time. Simulations are carried on a 13-bus MG to demonstrate the working principles of the proposed control scheme. The test results also prove the feasibility of the DNN-based parameter optimizer.