Step towards secure and reliable smart grids in Industry 5.0: A federated learning assisted hybrid deep learning model for electricity theft detection using smart meters

The integration of Smart Grid technology and conceptual Industry 5.0 has paved the way for advanced energy management systems that enhance efficiency and revolutionized the parallel integration of power sources in a sustainable manner. However, this digitization has opened a new stream of the threat and opportunities of electricity theft posing a significant challenge to the security and reliability of Smart Grid networks. In this paper, we propose a secure and reliable theft detection technique using deep federated learning (FL) mechanism. The technique leverages the collaborative power of FL to train a Convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit (ConvGRU) model on distributed data sources without compromising data privacy. The training deep learning model backbone consists of a ConvGRU model that combines convolutional and gated recurrent units to capture spatial and temporal patterns in electricity consumption data. An improvised preprocessing mechanism and hyperparameter tuning is done to facilitate FL mechanism. The halving randomized search algorithm is used for hyperparameters tuning of the ConvGRU model. The impact of hyperparameters involved in the ConvGRU model such as number of layers, filters, kernel size, activation function, pooling, GRU layers, hidden state dimension, learning rate, and the dropout rate is elaborated. The proposed technique achieves promising results, with high accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, demonstrating its efficacy in detecting electricity theft in Smart Grid networks. Comparative analysis with existing techniques reveal the superior performance of the deep FL-based ConvGRU model. The findings highlight the potential of this approach in enhancing the security and efficiency of Smart Grid systems while preserving data privacy.