Clemens Kortmann | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Does Demand Response Increase Vulnerability to Cyber Attacks by Adversarial Data Modifications?

Adversarial attacks are crafted data manipulations that aim to deteriorate the outcomes of prediction or decision-making algorithms. In the energy systems literature, adversarial attacks have been studied with a focus on problems regarding the electricity grid. Such problems include forecasting and grid state estimation, where adversarial attacks are also known as false data injection attacks. Only few studies have analyzed the potential impact that adversarial attacks have on the demand side. We analyze how manipulated price forecasts impact the decision-making in industrial demand response. To this end, we design adversarial attacks that aim to deteriorate the output of electricity price forecasting models and solve scheduling optimization problems of energy-intensive production processes using the distorted price forecasts. We make use of a generalized process model to investigate the vulnerability to adversarial attacks for a range of production scheduling problems with different levels of process flexibility. We find that adversarial attacks can erode the profits gained from demand response. However, when perturbations are limited in extent (so that they are hard to detect by the human user), demand response preserves about 90\% of its financial advantage compared to steady-state process operation. Further, we find that the impact of adversarial attacks on demand response does not only depend on the magnitude of the perturbations but rather on the orientation of the adversarial perturbations. Therefore, we argue that attack analyses should explicitly incorporate the sensitivities of scheduling optimization models into the attack design to enable more rigorous assessments of decision-making under adversarial attacks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Federated Learning from Molecules to Processes: A Perspective

We present a perspective on federated learning in chemical engineering that envisions collaborative efforts in machine learning (ML) developments within the chemical industry. Large amounts of chemical and process data are proprietary to chemical companies and are therefore locked in data silos, hindering the training of ML models on large data sets in chemical engineering. Recently, the concept of federated learning has gained increasing attention in ML research, enabling organizations to jointly train machine learning models without disclosure of their individual data. We discuss potential applications of federated learning in several fields of chemical engineering, from the molecular to the process scale. In addition, we apply federated learning in two exemplary case studies that simulate practical scenarios of multiple chemical companies holding proprietary data sets: (i) prediction of binary mixture activity coefficients with graph neural networks and (ii) system identification of a distillation column with autoencoders. Our results indicate that ML models jointly trained with federated learning yield significantly higher accuracy than models trained by each chemical company individually and can perform similarly to models trained on combined datasets from all companies. Federated learning has therefore great potential to advance ML models in chemical engineering while respecting corporate data privacy, making it promising for future industrial applications.

cs.LG↗