Affiliations: Consorzio di Ricerca Sistema ad Agenti, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli studi di Salerno, Fisciano, Italy. E-mails: gformato@corisa.it, loia@unisa.it | Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale, Università degli studi di Salerno, Fisciano, Italy. E-mail: vpaciello@unisa.it | Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli studi del Sannio, Benevento, Italy. E-mail: vaccaro@unisannio.it
Note: [] Corresponding author: Giuseppina Formato, Consorzio di Ricerca Sistema ad Agenti (CORISA), Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli studi di Salerno, 84084 Fisciano (SA), Italy. E-mail: gformato@corisa.it
Abstract: Synchronized Wide-Area Monitoring Systems (WAMS) involve the use of power system-wide measurements to avoid large disturbances and reduce the probability of catastrophic events. In these systems a large volume of raw data is collected by distributed sensors and sent to central servers for post processing activities. Many research works conjectured that this hierarchical monitoring paradigm could be not affordable in addressing the increasing network complexity and the massive data exchanging characterizing modern smart grids. Unaffordable complexity, hardware redundancy, network bandwidth and data storage resources are the main barriers imposed by technology and costs. Moreover, in WAMS the global absolute time reference for sensors synchronization is typically obtained by satellite-based timing signals processing. Since these signals are extremely vulnerable to radiofrequency interference (i.e. cyber-attacks), effective countermeasures aimed at increasing the resilience of synchronized WAMS to external and internal interferences need to be designed. In trying and addressing these challenges, in this paper the role of decentralized consensus protocols for decentralized and synchronized wide area smart grids monitoring is analyzed.
