A Survey of Resilient Coordination for Cyber-Physical Systems Against Malicious Attacks

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) facilitate the integration of physical entities and cyber infrastructures through the utilization of pervasive computational resources and communication units, leading to improved efficiency, automation, and practical viability in both academia and industry. Due to its openness and distributed characteristics, a critical issue prevalent in CPSs is to guarantee resilience in presence of malicious attacks. This paper conducts a comprehensive survey of recent advances on resilient coordination for CPSs. Different from existing survey papers, we focus on the node injection attack and propose a novel taxonomy according to the multi-layered framework of CPS. Furthermore, miscellaneous resilient coordination problems are discussed in this survey. Specifically, some preliminaries and the fundamental problem settings are given at the beginning. Subsequently, based on a multi-layered framework of CPSs, promising results of resilient consensus are classified and reviewed from three perspectives: physical structure, communication mechanism, and network topology. Next, two typical application scenarios, i.e., multi-robot systems and smart grids are exemplified to extend resilient consensus to other coordination tasks. Particularly, we examine resilient containment and resilient distributed optimization problems, both of which demonstrate the applicability of resilient coordination approaches. Finally, potential avenues are highlighted for future research.Comment: 35 pages, 7 figures, 5 table

Distributed Robust Consensus Control of Multi-agent Systems with Heterogeneous Matching Uncertainties

This paper considers the distributed consensus problem of linear multi-agent systems subject to different matching uncertainties for both the cases without and with a leader of bounded unknown control input. Due to the existence of nonidentical uncertainties, the multi-agent systems discussed in this paper are essentially heterogeneous. For the case where the communication graph is undirected and connected, a distributed continuous static consensus protocol based on the relative state information is first designed, under which the consensus error is uniformly ultimately bounded and exponentially converges to a small adjustable residual set. A fully distributed adaptive consensus protocol is then designed, which, contrary to the static protocol, relies on neither the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix nor the upper bounds of the uncertainties. For the case where there exists a leader whose control input is unknown and bounded, distributed static and adaptive consensus protocols are proposed to ensure the boundedness of the consensus error. It is also shown that the proposed protocols can be redesigned so as to ensure the boundedness of the consensus error in the presence of bounded external disturbances which do not satisfy the matching condition. A sufficient condition for the existence of the proposed protocols is that each agent is stabilizable.Comment: 16 page, 10 figures. This manuscript is an extended version of our paper accepted for publication by Automatic

Consensus Synthesis of Robust Cooperative Control for Homogeneous Leader-Follower Multi-Agent Systems Subject to Parametric Uncertainty

This paper presents a design of robust consensus for homogeneous leader-follower multiagent systems (MAS). Each agent of MAS is described by a linear time-invariant dynamic model subject to parametric uncertainty. The agents are interconnected through a static interconnection matrix over an undirected graph to cooperate and share information with their neighbours. The consensus design of MAS can be transformed to stability analysis by using decomposition technique. We apply Lyapunov theorem to derive the sufficient condition to ensure the consensus of all independent subsystems. In addition, we design a robust distributed state feedback gain based on linear quadratic regulator (LQR) setting. Controller gain is computed via solving a linear matrix inequality. As a result, we provide a robust design procedure of a cooperative LQR control to achieve consensus objective and maximize the admissible bound of the uncertainty. Finally, we give numerical examples to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed consensus design. The results show that the response for MAS in presence of uncertainty using robust consensus design follows the response of the leader and is better than that of the existingnominal consensus design

Distributed Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems Under Detectability and Communication Constraints

Cooperative control of multi-agent systems has recently gained widespread attention from the scientific communities due to numerous applications in areas such as the formation control in unmanned vehicles, cooperative attitude control of spacecrafts, clustering of micro-satellites, environmental monitoring and exploration by mobile sensor networks, etc. The primary goal of a cooperative control problem for multi-agent systems is to design a decentralized control algorithm for each agent, relying on the local coordination of their actions to exhibit a collective behavior. Common challenges encountered in the study of cooperative control problems are unavailable group-level information, and limited bandwidth of the shared communication. In this dissertation, we investigate one of such cooperative control problems, namely cooperative output regulation, under various local and global level constraints coming from physical and communication limitations. The objective of the cooperative output regulation problem (CORP) for multi-agent systems is to design a distributed control strategy for the agents to synchronize their state with an external system, called the leader, in the presence of disturbance inputs. For the problem at hand, we additionally consider the scenario in which none of the agents can independently access the synchronization signal from their view of the leader, and therefore it is not possible for the agents to achieve the group objective by themselves unless they cooperate among members. To this end, we devise a novel distributed estimation algorithm to collectively gather the leader states under the discussed detectability constraint, and then use this estimation to synthesize a distributed control solution to the problem. Next, we extend our results in CORP to the case with uncertain agent dynamics arising from modeling errors. In addition to the detectability constraint, we also assumed that the local regulated error signals are not available to the agents for feedback, and thus none of the agents have all the required measurements to independently synthesize a control solution. By combining the distributed observer and a control law based on the internal model principle for the agents, we offer a solution to the robust CORP under these added constraints. In practical applications of multi-agent systems, it is difficult to consistently maintain a reliable communication between the agents. By considering such challenge in the communication, we study the CORP for the case when agents are connected through a time-varying communication topology. Due to the presence of the detectability constraint that none of the agents can independently access all the leader states at any switching instant, we devise a distributed estimation algorithm for the agents to collectively reconstruct the leader states. Then by using this estimation, a distributed dynamic control solution is offered to solve the CORP under the added communication constraint. Since the fixed communication network is a special case of this time-varying counterpart, the offered control solution can be viewed as a generalization of the former results. For effective validation of previous theoretical results, we apply the control algorithms to a practical case study problem on synchronizing the position of networked motors under time-varying communication. Based on our experimental results, we also demonstrate the uniqueness of derived control solutions. Another communication constraint affecting the cooperative control performance is the presence of network delays. To this regard, first we study the distributed state estimation problem of an autonomous plant by a network of observers under heterogeneous time-invariant delays and then extend to the time-varying counterpart. With the use of a low gain based estimation technique, we derive a sufficient stability condition in terms of the upper bound of the low gain parameter or the time delay to guarantee the convergence of estimation errors. Additionally, when the plant measurements are subject to bounded disturbances, we find that that the local estimation errors also remain bounded. Lastly, by using this estimation, we present a distributed control solution for a leader-follower synchronization problem of a multi-agent system. Next, we present another case study concerning a synchronization control problem of a group of distributed generators in an islanded microgrid under unknown time-varying latency. Similar to the case of delayed communication in aforementioned works, we offer a low gain based distributed control protocol to synchronize the terminal voltage and inverter operating frequency

Distributed Cooperative Regulation for Multiagent Systems and Its Applications to Power Systems: A Survey

Cooperative regulation of multiagent systems has become an active research area in the past decade. This paper reviews some recent progress in distributed coordination control for leader-following multiagent systems and its applications in power system and mainly focuses on the cooperative tracking control in terms of consensus tracking control and containment tracking control. Next, methods on how to rank the network nodes are summarized for undirected/directed network, based on which one can determine which follower should be connected to leaders such that partial followers can perceive leaders’ information. Furthermore, we present a survey of the most relevant scientific studies investigating the regulation and optimization problems in power systems based on distributed strategies. Finally, some potential applications in the frequency tracking regulation of smart grids are discussed at the end of the paper

Flocking control against the malicious agent

This paper investigates the flocking control of a swarm with a malicious agent that falsifies its controller parameters to cause collision, division, and escape of agents in the swarm. A novel geometric flocking condition is established by designing the configuration of the malicious agent and its neighbors, under which we propose a hierarchal geometric configuration-based flocking control method. To help detect the malicious agent, a parameter estimate mechanism is also provided. The proposed method can achieve the flocking control goal and meanwhile contain the malicious agent in the swarm without removing it. Experimental result shows the effectiveness of the theoretical result

Control Plane in Software Defined Networks and Stateful Data Planes

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