Hybrid Fault-Tolerant and Attack-Resilient Cooperative Control in an Offshore Wind Farm

Modern wind farms promise increased capacity, sustainability, and efficiency through the integration of information technology with the existing wind energy technologies. However, this integration creates a new category of cyber-physical vulnerabilities stemming from physical faults and/or cyberattacks potentially leading to devastating physical impacts and catastrophic consequences. The large scale and high complexity of a wind farm, in addition to its growing connectivity, control functionality, and wind intermittency and variability make the task of cyber-physical protection particularly challenging. This paper introduces novel approaches for guaranteeing the safety, security, and reliability of a modern wind farm under simultaneous occurrence of faults and attacks using an advanced cyber-physical health monitoring scheme, defined as “intrusion detection and fault diagnosis system”, as well as fault-tolerant/attack-resilient control strategies at different levels. The proposed fault-tolerant control strategy is based on adaptive model predictive control at turbine level, enhanced with a control reallocation mechanism at farm level. The attack-resilient control strategy is based on an automatic signal correction (ASC) technique that is applied at network operator level. The effectiveness of the suggested approaches is demonstrated using an offshore wind farm model under wind turbulences, measurement noises, and realistic physical fault and cyberattack scenarios.