Communication Scheduling and Remote Estimation With Adversarial Intervention

We study a communication scheduling and remote estimation problem within a worst-case scenario that involves a strategic adversary. Specially, a remote sensing system consisting of a sensor, an encoder and a decoder is configured to observe,transmit, and recover a discrete time stochastic process. At each time step, the sensor makes an observation on the state variable of the stochastic process. The sensor is constrained by the number of transmissions over the time horizon, and thus it needs to decide whether to transmit its observation or not after making each measurement. If the sensor decides to transmit,it sends the observation to the encoder, who then encodes and transmits the observation to the decoder. Otherwise, the sensor and the encoder maintain silence. The decoder is required to generate a real-time estimate on the state variable. The sensor,the encoder, and the decoder collaborate to minimize the sum of the communication cost for the sensor, the encoding cost for the encoder, and the estimation error for the decoder. There is also a jammer interfering with the communication between the encoder and the decoder, by injecting an additive channel noise to the communication channel. The jammer is charged for the jamming power and is rewarded for the estimation error generated by the decoder, and it aims to minimize its net cost. We consider a feedback Stackelberg game with the sensor, the encoder, and the decoder as the composite leader, and the jammer as the follower. Under some technical assumptions, we obtain a feedback Stackelberg solution, which is threshold based for the scheduler,and piecewise affine for the encoder and the decoder. We also generate numerical results to demonstrate the performance of the remote sensing system under the feedback Stackelberg solution.

A note on diagnosis and performance degradation detection in automatic control systems towards functional safety and cyber security

This note addresses diagnosis and performance degradation detection issues from an integrated viewpoint of functionality maintenance and cyber security of automatic control systems.It calls for more research attention on three aspects:(i)application of control and detection uni ed framework to enhancing the diagnosis capability of feedback control systems,(ii)projection-based fault detection,and complementary and explainable applications of projection-and machine learning-based techniques,and(iii)system performance degradation detection that is of elemental importance for today's automatic control systems.Some ideas and conceptual schemes are presented and illustrated by means of examples,serving as convincing arguments for research e orts in these aspects.They would contribute to the future development of capable diagnosis systems for functionality safe and cyber secure automatic control systems.