A virtual actuator approach for the secure control of networked LPV systems under pulse-width modulated DoS attacks

In this paper, we formulate and analyze the problem of secure control in the context of networked linear parameter varying (LPV) systems. We consider an energy-constrained, pulse-width modulated (PWM) jammer, which corrupts the control communication channel by performing a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. In particular, the malicious attacker is able to erase the data sent to one or more actuators. In order to achieve secure control, we propose a virtual actuator technique under the assumption that the behavior of the attacker has been identified. The main advantage brought by this technique is that the existing components in the control system can be maintained without need of retuning them, since the virtual actuator will perform a reconfiguration of the plant, hiding the attack from the controller point of view. Using Lyapunov-based results that take into account the possible behavior of the attacker, design conditions for calculating the virtual actuators gains are obtained. A numerical example is used to illustrate the proposed secure control strategy.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Fault detection and isolation of malicious nodes in MIMO Multi-hop Control Networks

A MIMO Multi-hop Control Network (MCN) consists of a MIMO LTI system where the communication between sensors, actuators and computational units is supported by a (wireless) multi-hop communication network, and data flow is performed using scheduling and routing of sensing and actuation data. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the plant dynamics and on the communication protocol configuration such that the Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) problem of failures and malicious attacks to communication nodes can be solved.Comment: 6 page

Vibration-based methods for structural and machinery fault diagnosis based on nonlinear dynamics tools

This study explains and demonstrates the utilisation of different nonlinear-dynamics-based procedures for the purposes of structural health monitoring as well as for monitoring of robot joints

Self-Triggered and Event-Triggered Set-Valued Observers

This paper addresses the problem of reducing the required network load and computational power for the implementation of Set-Valued Observers (SVOs) in Networked Control System (NCS). Event- and self-triggered strategies for NCS, modeled as discrete-time Linear Parameter-Varying (LPV) systems, are studied by showing how the triggering condition can be selected. The methodology provided can be applied to determine when it is required to perform a full (``classical'') computation of the SVOs, while providing low-complexity state overbounds for the remaining time, at the expenses of temporarily reducing the estimation accuracy. As part of the procedure, an algorithm is provided to compute a suitable centrally symmetric polytope that allows to find hyper-parallelepiped and ellipsoidal overbounds to the exact set-valued state estimates calculated by the SVOs. By construction, the proposed triggering techniques do not influence the convergence of the SVOs, as at some subsequent time instants, set-valued estimates are computed using the \emph{conventional} SVOs. Results are provided for the triggering frequency of the self-triggered strategy and two interesting cases: distributed systems when the dynamics of all nodes are equal up to a reordering of the matrix; and when the probability distribution of the parameters influencing the dynamics is known. The performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated in simulation by using a time-sensitive example