Artificial intelligence and blockchain technology for secure smart grid and power distribution Automation: A State-of-the-Art Review

Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrated with Blockchain distributed ledger technology (BDLT) has become the most attractive research area in the domain of renewable energy and related power automations. However, the increased use of renewable energy-enabled devices raised various challenging problems, such as smart grid-based control management, power distribution, and automations. In this manner, the collaborative approach of blockchain, AI, and wireless sensor networks (WSN) provides a secure platform for control centers to estimate state, which helps to detect and analysis of bad data movement. There are various emerging issues in the field of Blockchain-AI in a renewable environment that poses a serious impact on the technological evaluation, for example, monitoring of contingency, optimal power flow, network reconfiguration, and the commitment of security-constrained units, and control auto-generation. So, in this paper, we perform a systematic review of the state-of-the-art integrated artificial intelligence and blockchain-enabled scheduling, management, optimization, privacy, and security of the smart grid and power distribution automation. One of the focusing aspects of this research is the real-time analysis of the physical layer of the smart grid. However, in this paper, we design a framework of a unified and abstracted state-space, in which the system analysis involves malicious attacks and maintain an effective generalized defense hierarchy in real-time. The current mechanism of analysis of smart grid-enabled physical layer-based malicious attacks is categorized into their associative and targeted components. Thus, we present three different pseudo-smart contracts and digital signatures with consensus policies; that provide an understanding of the new registry of renewable smart grids details, participating stakeholders and their roles, and an updated power distribution automation ledger. We then highlighted the list of emerging power distribution automation-related limitations along with the informational management approaches that present the existing state-of-the-art in this domain, including data-driven, target defense, computation, preservation, etc. Finally, we discuss open research issues and future directions of the smart grid and automation of power distribution security and privacy.