25,032 research outputs found
Organic Design of Massively Distributed Systems: A Complex Networks Perspective
The vision of Organic Computing addresses challenges that arise in the design
of future information systems that are comprised of numerous, heterogeneous,
resource-constrained and error-prone components or devices. Here, the notion
organic particularly highlights the idea that, in order to be manageable, such
systems should exhibit self-organization, self-adaptation and self-healing
characteristics similar to those of biological systems. In recent years, the
principles underlying many of the interesting characteristics of natural
systems have been investigated from the perspective of complex systems science,
particularly using the conceptual framework of statistical physics and
statistical mechanics. In this article, we review some of the interesting
relations between statistical physics and networked systems and discuss
applications in the engineering of organic networked computing systems with
predictable, quantifiable and controllable self-* properties.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figures, preprint of submission to Informatik-Spektrum
published by Springe
Secure Distributed Dynamic State Estimation in Wide-Area Smart Grids
Smart grid is a large complex network with a myriad of vulnerabilities,
usually operated in adversarial settings and regulated based on estimated
system states. In this study, we propose a novel highly secure distributed
dynamic state estimation mechanism for wide-area (multi-area) smart grids,
composed of geographically separated subregions, each supervised by a local
control center. We firstly propose a distributed state estimator assuming
regular system operation, that achieves near-optimal performance based on the
local Kalman filters and with the exchange of necessary information between
local centers. To enhance the security, we further propose to (i) protect the
network database and the network communication channels against attacks and
data manipulations via a blockchain (BC)-based system design, where the BC
operates on the peer-to-peer network of local centers, (ii) locally detect the
measurement anomalies in real-time to eliminate their effects on the state
estimation process, and (iii) detect misbehaving (hacked/faulty) local centers
in real-time via a distributed trust management scheme over the network. We
provide theoretical guarantees regarding the false alarm rates of the proposed
detection schemes, where the false alarms can be easily controlled. Numerical
studies illustrate that the proposed mechanism offers reliable state estimation
under regular system operation, timely and accurate detection of anomalies, and
good state recovery performance in case of anomalies
Consensus Computation in Unreliable Networks: A System Theoretic Approach
This work addresses the problem of ensuring trustworthy computation in a
linear consensus network. A solution to this problem is relevant for several
tasks in multi-agent systems including motion coordination, clock
synchronization, and cooperative estimation. In a linear consensus network, we
allow for the presence of misbehaving agents, whose behavior deviate from the
nominal consensus evolution. We model misbehaviors as unknown and unmeasurable
inputs affecting the network, and we cast the misbehavior detection and
identification problem into an unknown-input system theoretic framework. We
consider two extreme cases of misbehaving agents, namely faulty (non-colluding)
and malicious (Byzantine) agents. First, we characterize the set of inputs that
allow misbehaving agents to affect the consensus network while remaining
undetected and/or unidentified from certain observing agents. Second, we
provide worst-case bounds for the number of concurrent faulty or malicious
agents that can be detected and identified. Precisely, the consensus network
needs to be 2k+1 (resp. k+1) connected for k malicious (resp. faulty) agents to
be generically detectable and identifiable by every well behaving agent. Third,
we quantify the effect of undetectable inputs on the final consensus value.
Fourth, we design three algorithms to detect and identify misbehaving agents.
The first and the second algorithm apply fault detection techniques, and
affords complete detection and identification if global knowledge of the
network is available to each agent, at a high computational cost. The third
algorithm is designed to exploit the presence in the network of weakly
interconnected subparts, and provides local detection and identification of
misbehaving agents whose behavior deviates more than a threshold, which is
quantified in terms of the interconnection structure
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