Cyber-Physical Resilience of Co-operating Autonomous Systems

Key research question: How to combine control-theoretic methods and cybersecurity techniques in order to jointly satisfy performance and security requirements of co-operating autonomous systems? Objectives: 1) Define scenarios for Co-operating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to limit the scope of the study. 2) Specify performance and security requirements for Cyber-Physical Resilience. 3) Model the cyber and physical parts of the system together with cyber-physical interactions. 4) Propose a co-design framework to address jointly control performance and cyber security. 5) Carry out co-designs for reference scenarios and assess the resulting performance. The proposed approach to Cyber-Physical Resilience will combine three elements: (i) Cross-layer design in which the traditionally separate layers of the OSI model will be considered jointly, especially the three layers in the bottom of the stack: Physical, Data Link and Network layers. (ii) Co-design formulation to address both system security and control performance through the concept of interface variables to capture the cyber-physical interactions. (iii)The use of the new University experimental facilities, including MUEVI and IMEC. We are planning to work with an Industrial Partner, the Spirent business unit specialising in Robust Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT). Our Academic Partner will be the Networked Systems Security Group at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden.