Secure distributed adaptive optimal coordination of nonlinear cyber-physical systems with attack diagnosis

TL;DR

This paper presents a secure distributed optimal coordination framework for nonlinear cyber-physical systems that effectively detects and isolates malicious cyber attacks, ensuring system stability and optimal performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel attack diagnosis method with adaptive thresholds and a two-layer control structure for secure, optimal coordination of nonlinear CPSs under cyber attacks.

Findings

The proposed attack diagnosis guarantees detection and isolation of malicious behaviors.

The control architecture ensures attack-free subsystems reach optimal consensus.

Simulation confirms effectiveness in underwater vehicle coordination.

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of distributed optimal coordination (DOC) for a class of nonlinear large-scale cyber-physical systems (CPSs) in the presence of cyber attacks. A secure DOC architecture with attack diagnosis is proposed that guarantees the attack-free subsystems to achieve the output consensus which minimizes the sum of their objective functions, while the attacked subsystems converge to preset secure states. A two-layer DOC structure is established with emphasis on the interactions between cyber and physical layers, where a command-driven control law is designed that generates provable optimal output consensus. Differing from the existing fault diagnosis methods which are generally applicable to given failure types, the focus of the attack diagnosis is to achieve detection and isolation for arbitrary malicious behaviors. To this end, double coupling residuals are generated by a carefully-designed distributed filter. The adaptive thresholds with prescribed performance are designed to enhance the detectability and isolability. It is theoretically guaranteed that any attack signal cannot bypass the designed attack diagnosis methodology to destroy the convergence of the DOC algorithm, and the locally-occurring detectable attack can be isolated from the propagating attacks from neighboring subsystems. Simulation results for the motion coordination of multiple remotely operated underwater vehicles illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.