This paper provides a survey of the literature on the application of Multi-agent Systems (MAS) technology for Smartgrids. Smartgrids represent the next generation electric network, as communities are developing self-sufficient and environmentally friendly energy production. As a cyber-physical system, the development of the vision of Smartgrids requires the resolution of major technical problems; this has fed over a decade of research. Due to the stochastic, intermittent nature of renewable energy resources and the heterogeneity of the agents involved in a Smartgrid, demand and supply management, energy trade and control of grid elements constitute great challenges for stable operation. In addition, in order to offer resilience against faults and attacks, Smartgrids should also have restoration, self-recovery and security capabilities. Multi-agent systems (MAS) technology has been a popular approach to deal with these challenges in Smartgrids, due to their ability to support reasoning in a distributed context. This survey reviews the literature concerning the use of MAS models in each of the relevant research areas related to Smartgrids. The survey explores how researchers have utilized agent-based tools and methods to solve the main problems of Smartgrids. The survey also discusses the challenges in the advancement of Smartgrid technology and identifies the open problems for research from the view of multi-agent systems.
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Resilience of Multi-robot Systems to Physical Masquerade Attacks
The advent of autonomous mobile multi-robot systems has driven innovation in both the industrial and defense sectors. The integration of such systems in safety- and security- critical applications has raised concern over their resilience to attack. In this work, we investigate the security problem of a stealthy adversary masquerading as a properly functioning agent. We show that conventional multi-agent pathfinding solutions are vulnerable to these physical masquerade attacks. Furthermore, we provide a constraint-based formulation of multi-agent pathfinding that yields multi-agent plans that are provably resilient to physical masquerade attacks. This formalization leverages inter-agent observations to facilitate introspective monitoring to guarantee resilience.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1932162
- PAR ID:
- 10175168
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2019 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 120 to 125
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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