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In the smart grid, bidirectional information exchange among customers, operators, and control devices significantly improves the efficiency of energy supplying and consumption. However, integration of intelligence and cyber systems into a power grid can lead to serious cyber security challenges and makes the overall system more vulnerable to cyber attacks. To address this challenging issue, this article presents defense mechanisms to either protect the system from attackers in advance or detect the existence of data injection attacks to improve the smart grid security. Focusing on signal processing techniques, this article introduces an adaptive scheme on detection of injected bad data at the control center. This scheme takes the power measurements of two sequential data collection slots into account, and detects data injection attacks by monitoring the measurement variations and state changes between the two time slots. The proposed scheme has the capability of adaptively detecting attacks including both non-stealthy attacks and stealthy attacks. Stealthy attacks are proved impossible to detect using conventional residual- based methods, and can cause more dangerous effects on power systems than non-stealthy attacks. It is demonstrated that the proposed scheme can also be used for attack classification to help system operators prioritize their actions to better protect their systems, and is therefore very valuable in practical smart grid systems.

With the increasing number of vehicle and traffic jams, urban-traffic management is becoming a serious issue. In this article, we propose novel four-tier architecture for urban-traffic management with the convergence of vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs), 5G wireless network, software-defined network (SDN), and mobile-edge computing (MEC) technologies. The proposed architecture provides better communication and rapider responsive speed in a more distributed and dynamic manner. The practical case of rapid accident rescue can significantly cut down the time for rescue. Key technologies with respect to vehicle localization, data pre-fetching, traffic lights control, and traffic prediction are also discussed. Obviously, the novel architecture shows noteworthy potential for alleviating the traffic congestion and improving the efficiency of urban-traffic management.

One big challenge in building a smart grid arises from the fast growing amount of data and limited communication resources. The traditional centralized communication architecture does not scale well with the explosive increase of data and has a high probability of encountering communication bottlenecks due to long communication paths. To address this challenging issue, this article presents a distributed communication architecture that implements smart grid communications in an efficient and cost-effective way. This distributed architecture consists of multiple distributed operation centers, each of which is connected to several data concentrators serving one local area and only sends summary or required integrated information to a central operation center. Using this distributed architecture, communication distance is much shortened, and thus data will be delivered more efficiently and reliably. In addition, such a distributed architecture can manage and analyze data locally, rather than backhauling all raw data to the central operation center, leading to reduced cost and burden on communication resources. Advanced metering infrastructure is chosen as an example to demonstrate benefits of this architecture on improving communication performance. The distributed communication architecture is also readily applicable to other smart grid applications, for example, demand response management systems.

Power systems are undergoing massive operational and technological changes amid increasing demand for environmental sustainability and energy efficiency. The traditional supply-driven approach, relying on large-scale generation plants, which dominated old utilities is reconsidered to incorporate the increased penetration of variable renewable energy sources, and distributed generation and storage. Demand response is an important instrument for improving energy efficiency, since it increases consumers' engagement and provides a mechanism to reduce or shift consumption, resulting in energy savings. Regulators and policy makers in several European countries are taking substantial measures to encourage market uptake of demand response as a means to mitigate the limitations of the existing grid and boost the transition to a low carbon economy. This goes hand in hand with the deployment of services by stakeholders who aggregate consumption flexibility and offer it to grid operators or to the electricity market. Several large-scale pilot projects explore the feasibility of demand response in residential and small commercial customers. This article provides an overview of the current regulatory and policy framework in Europe, and summarizes the state of play of commercial and pilot demand response deployments in various European countries. Also, it highlights some key research objectives associated with demand response.