Where Should Traffic Sensors Be Placed on Highways?

This paper investigates the practical engineering problem of traffic sensors placement on stretched highways with ramps. Since it is virtually impossible to install bulky traffic sensors on each highway segment, it is crucial to find placements that result in optimized network-wide, traffic observability. Consequently, this results in accurate traffic density estimates on segments where sensors are not installed. The substantial contribution of this paper is the utilization of control-theoretic observability analysis -- jointly with integer programming -- to determine traffic sensor locations based on the nonlinear dynamics and parameters of traffic networks. In particular, the celebrated asymmetric cell transmission model is used to guide the placement strategy jointly with observability analysis of nonlinear dynamic systems through Gramians. Thorough numerical case studies are presented to corroborate the proposed theoretical methods and various computational research questions are posed and addressed. The presented approach can also be extended to other models of traffic dynamics

State-Robust Observability Measures for Sensor Selection in Nonlinear Dynamic Systems

This paper explores the problem of selecting sensor nodes for a general class of nonlinear dynamical networks. In particular, we study the problem by utilizing altered definitions of observability and open-loop lifted observers. The approach is performed by discretizing the system's dynamics using the implicit Runge-Kutta method and by introducing a state-averaged observability measure. The observability measure is computed for a number of perturbed initial states in the vicinity of the system's true initial state. The sensor node selection problem is revealed to retain the submodular and modular properties of the original problem. This allows the problem to be solved efficiently using a greedy algorithm with a guaranteed performance bound while showing an augmented robustness to unknown or uncertain initial conditions. The validity of this approach is numerically demonstrated on a $H_{2}/O_{2}$ combustion reaction network.Comment: To Appear in the 62$^{\text{nd}}$ IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC'2023), Singapore, Decemeber 202

Revisiting the Optimal PMU Placement Problem in Multi-Machine Power Networks

To provide real-time visibility of physics-based states, phasor measurement units (PMUs) are deployed throughout power networks. PMU data enable real-time grid monitoring and control -- and is essential in transitioning to smarter grids. Various considerations are taken into account when determining the geographic, optimal PMU placements (OPP). This paper focuses on the control-theoretic, observability aspect of OPP. A myriad of studies have investigated observability-based formulations to determine the OPP within a transmission network. However, they have mostly adopted a simplified representation of system dynamics, ignored basic algebraic equations that model power flows, disregarded including renewables such as solar and wind, and did not model their uncertainty. Consequently, this paper revisits the observability-based OPP problem by addressing the literature's limitations. A nonlinear differential algebraic representation (NDAE) of the power system is considered and implicitly discretized -- using various different discretization approaches -- while explicitly accounting for uncertainty. A moving horizon estimation approach is explored to reconstruct the joint differential and algebraic initial states of the system, as a gateway to the OPP problem which is then formulated as a computationally tractable integer program (IP). Comprehensive numerical simulations on standard power networks are conducted to validate various aspects of this approach and test its robustness to various dynamical conditions

Gramian Angular Field Transformation-Based Intrusion Detection

Cyber threats are increasing progressively in their frequency, scale, sophistication, and cost. The advancement of such threats has raised the need to enhance intelligent intrusion-detection systems. In this study, a different perspective has been developed for intrusion detection. Gramian angular fields were adapted to encode network traffic data as images. Hereby, a way to reveal bilateral feature relationships and benefit from the visual interpretation capability of deep-learning methods has been opened. Then, image-encoded intrusions were classified as binary and multi-class using convolutional neural networks. The obtained results were compared to both conventional machine-learning methods and related studies. According to the results, the proposed approach surpassed the success of traditional methods and produced success rates that were close to the related studies. Despite the use of complex mechanisms such as feature extraction, feature selection, class balancing, virtual data generation, or ensemble classifiers in related studies, the proposed approach is fairly plain -- involving only data-image conversion and classification. This shows the power of simply changing the problem space