Abstract:

In recent years, the cyber-physical security of power electronics systems has become more and more popular and prominent. In this article, the authors present a vulnerability assessment and a coordinated detection method to improve the cyber-physical security of electric vehicles with four motor drives, which is one of the emerging power electronics applications. Cyber-Threats to motor drives can cause vehicle instability and thus life-threatening consequences, as the lateral stability control system (LSCS) is built by the yaw moment produced by the torque deviation between distributed motors. In response to this issue, the authors propose a set of innovative index-based metrics to evaluate the performance degradation due to cyber-physical attacks on the LSCS and motor drives. Evaluation results, including both transient and statistic results, are provided for a variety of threat scenarios. To further improve the cyber-physical security of the electric vehicle, authors propose a coordinated detection methodology that combines the state observer and the proposed evaluation metrics. The simulation results have validated the effectiveness of the proposed detection method.