279 research outputs found
How Physicality Enables Trust: A New Era of Trust-Centered Cyberphysical Systems
Multi-agent cyberphysical systems enable new capabilities in efficiency,
resilience, and security. The unique characteristics of these systems prompt a
reevaluation of their security concepts, including their vulnerabilities, and
mechanisms to mitigate these vulnerabilities. This survey paper examines how
advancement in wireless networking, coupled with the sensing and computing in
cyberphysical systems, can foster novel security capabilities. This study
delves into three main themes related to securing multi-agent cyberphysical
systems. First, we discuss the threats that are particularly relevant to
multi-agent cyberphysical systems given the potential lack of trust between
agents. Second, we present prospects for sensing, contextual awareness, and
authentication, enabling the inference and measurement of ``inter-agent trust"
for these systems. Third, we elaborate on the application of quantifiable trust
notions to enable ``resilient coordination," where ``resilient" signifies
sustained functionality amid attacks on multiagent cyberphysical systems. We
refer to the capability of cyberphysical systems to self-organize, and
coordinate to achieve a task as autonomy. This survey unveils the cyberphysical
character of future interconnected systems as a pivotal catalyst for realizing
robust, trust-centered autonomy in tomorrow's world
Towards a Reference Architecture for Swarm Intelligence-based Internet of Things
International audienceThe Internet of Things (IoT) represents the global network which interconnects digital and physical entities. It aims at providing objects with intelligence that allows them to perceive, decide and cooperate with other objects, machines, systems and even humans to enable a whole new class of applications and services. Agent-Based Computing paradigm has been exploited to deal with the IoT system development. Many research works focus on making objects able to think by themselves thus imitating human brain. Swarm Intelligence studies the collective behavior of systems composed of many individuals who interact locally with each other and with their environment using decentralized and self-organized control to achieve complex tasks. Swarm intelligence-based systems provide decentralized, self-organized and robust systems with consideration of coordination frameworks. We explore in this paper the exploitation of swarm intelligence-based features in IoT-based systems. Therefore, we present a reference swarm-based architectural model that enables cooperation among devices in IoT systems
LQG Control and Sensing Co-Design
We investigate a Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control and sensing
co-design problem, where one jointly designs sensing and control policies. We
focus on the realistic case where the sensing design is selected among a finite
set of available sensors, where each sensor is associated with a different cost
(e.g., power consumption). We consider two dual problem instances:
sensing-constrained LQG control, where one maximizes control performance
subject to a sensor cost budget, and minimum-sensing LQG control, where one
minimizes sensor cost subject to performance constraints. We prove no
polynomial time algorithm guarantees across all problem instances a constant
approximation factor from the optimal. Nonetheless, we present the first
polynomial time algorithms with per-instance suboptimality guarantees. To this
end, we leverage a separation principle, that partially decouples the design of
sensing and control. Then, we frame LQG co-design as the optimization of
approximately supermodular set functions; we develop novel algorithms to solve
the problems; and we prove original results on the performance of the
algorithms, and establish connections between their suboptimality and
control-theoretic quantities. We conclude the paper by discussing two
applications, namely, sensing-constrained formation control and
resource-constrained robot navigation.Comment: Accepted to IEEE TAC. Includes contributions to submodular function
optimization literature, and extends conference paper arXiv:1709.0882
Weighted Age of Information based Scheduling for Large Population Games on Networks
In this paper, we consider a discrete-time multi-agent system involving
cost-coupled networked rational agents solving a consensus problem and a
central Base Station (BS), scheduling agent communications over a network. Due
to a hard bandwidth constraint on the number of transmissions through the
network, at most agents can concurrently access their state
information through the network. Under standard assumptions on the information
structure of the agents and the BS, we first show that the control actions of
the agents are free of any dual effect, allowing for separation between
estimation and control problems at each agent. Next, we propose a weighted age
of information (WAoI) metric for the scheduling problem of the BS, where the
weights depend on the estimation error of the agents. The BS aims to find the
optimum scheduling policy that minimizes the WAoI, subject to the hard
bandwidth constraint. Since this problem is NP hard, we first relax the hard
constraint to a soft update rate constraint, and then compute an optimal policy
for the relaxed problem by reformulating it into a Markov Decision Process
(MDP). This then inspires a sub-optimal policy for the bandwidth constrained
problem, which is shown to approach the optimal policy as . Next, we solve the consensus problem using the mean-field game
framework wherein we first design decentralized control policies for a limiting
case of the -agent system (as ). By explicitly
constructing the mean-field system, we prove the existence and uniqueness of
the mean-field equilibrium. Consequently, we show that the obtained equilibrium
policies constitute an -Nash equilibrium for the finite agent system.
Finally, we validate the performance of both the scheduling and the control
policies through numerical simulations.Comment: This work has been submitted to IEEE for possible publicatio
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