Coordinated EV Charging Attacks to Cause Transmission Line Overloads

This paper proposes a model for one of the most important cyber-attacks against an electric vehicle (EV) ecosystem. In the considered attack, the aim is to disrupt the normal operation of the transmission system (TS) by causing a spike in EV load demand in order to induce multiple branch overloads in the TS. We thus formulate a decision-making problem aiming at inducing line overloads by manipulating EV charging prices in different regions, while considering limited resources of the cyber-attacker and a simplified model of the TS. This problem is expressed from the attackers’ perspective as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem of maximizing the total magnitude of branch overloads. To illustrate the proposed model, it is applied to the Roy Billinton Test System. The simulation results show that this attack strategy could cause some problems in the TS.