An official website of the United States government
We consider the problems of asymptotic stability and robustness in large-scale second-order consensus networks and vehicle platoons in the discrete-time domain. First, we develop a graph-theoretic methodology to design the state feedback law for the second-order consensus networks and vehicle platoons in a discrete-time framework. We analyze the stability of such networks based on algebraic properties of the Laplacian matrices of underlying graphs and each vehicle’s update cycle (also known as the time step). We further provide a necessary and sufficient condition of stability of a linear second-order consensus network in the discrete-time domain. Moreover, we evaluate the robustness of the consensus networks by employing the expected value of the steady-state dispersion of the state of the entire network, also known as squared H2-norm, as a performance measure. We show the connection between performance measures with respect to network size, connectivity, and the update cycle. The main contribution of this work is that we provide a formal framework to quantify the relation between scaling performance measures and restrictions of the vehicles’ update cycles. Specifically, we show that denser networks (i.e., networks with more communications/edges) require faster agents (i.e., smaller update cycles) to outperform or achieve the same level of robustness as sparse networks (i.e., networks with fewer communications/edges).
more »
« less
Edge Selections in Bilinear Dynamic Networks
We develop some basic principles for the design and robustness analysis of a continuous-time bilinear dynamical network, where an attacker can manipulate the strength of the interconnections/edges between some of the agents/nodes. We formulate the edge protection optimization problem of picking a limited number of attack-free edges and minimizing the impact of the attack over the bilinear dynamical network. In particular, the H2-norm of bilinear systems is known to capture robustness and performance properties analogous to its linear counterpart and provides valuable insights for identifying which edges are most sensitive to attacks. The exact optimization problem is combinatorial in the number of edges, and brute-force approaches show poor scalability. However, we show that the H2-norm as a cost function is supermodular and, therefore, allows for efficient greedy approximations of the optimal solution. We illustrate and compare the effectiveness of our theoretical findings via numerical simulation
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10420021
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control
- ISSN:
- 0018-9286
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 8
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Recently, a broad class of linear delayed and ODE-PDEs systems was shown to have an equivalent representation using Partial Integral Equations (PIEs). In this paper, we use this PIE representation, combined with algorithms for convex optimization of Partial Integral (PI) operators to bound the H2-norm for input-output systems of this class. Specifically, the methods proposed here apply to delayed and ODE-PDE systems (including delayed PDE systems) in one or two spatial variables where the disturbance does not enter through the boundary. For such systems, we define a notion of H2-norm using an initial state-to-output framework and show that this notion reduces to more traditional concepts under the assumption of existence of a strongly continuous semigroup. Next, we consider input-output systems for which there exists a PIE representation and for such systems show that computing a minimal upper bound on the H2-norm of delayed and PDE systems can be equivalently formulated as a convex optimization problem subject to linear PI operator inequalities (LPIs). We convert, then, these optimization problems to Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) problems using the PIETOOLS toolbox. Finally, we apply the results to several numerical examples – focusing on time-delay systems (TDS) for which comparable H2 approximation results are available in the literature. The numerical results demonstrate the accuracy of the computed upper bound on the H2-norm.more » « less
-
We address the problem of distributed state estimation of a linear dynamical process in an attack-prone environment. A network of sensors, some of which can be compromised by adversaries, aim to estimate the state of the process. In this context, we investigate the impact of making a small subset of the nodes immune to attacks, or “trusted”. Given a set of trusted nodes, we identify separate necessary and sufficient conditions for resilient distributed state estimation. We use such conditions to illustrate how even a small trusted set can achieve a desired degree of robustness (where the robustness metric is specific to the problem under consideration) that could otherwise only be achieved via additional measurement and communication-link augmentation. We then establish that, unfortunately, the problem of selecting trusted nodes is NP-hard. Finally, we develop an attack-resilient, provably-correct distributed state estimation algorithm that appropriately leverages the presence of the trusted nodes.more » « less
-
Kumar, Amit; Ron-Zewi, Noga (Ed.)While much of network design focuses mostly on cost (number or weight of edges), node degrees have also played an important role. They have traditionally either appeared as an objective, to minimize the maximum degree (e.g., the Minimum Degree Spanning Tree problem), or as constraints that might be violated to give bicriteria approximations (e.g., the Minimum Cost Degree Bounded Spanning Tree problem). We extend the study of degrees in network design in two ways. First, we introduce and study a new variant of the Survivable Network Design Problem where in addition to the traditional objective of minimizing the cost of the chosen edges, we add a constraint that the 𝓁_p-norm of the node degree vector is bounded by an input parameter. This interpolates between the classical settings of maximum degree (the 𝓁_∞-norm) and the number of edges (the 𝓁₁-degree), and has natural applications in distributed systems and VLSI design. We give a constant bicriteria approximation in both measures using convex programming. Second, we provide a polylogarithmic bicriteria approximation for the Degree Bounded Group Steiner problem on bounded treewidth graphs, solving an open problem from [Guy Kortsarz and Zeev Nutov, 2022] and [X. Guo et al., 2022].more » « less
-
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used in many applications. However, their robustness against adversarial attacks is criticized. Prior studies show that using unnoticeable modifications on graph topology or nodal features can significantly reduce the performances of GNNs. It is very challenging to design robust graph neural networks against poisoning attack and several efforts have been taken. Existing work aims at reducing the negative impact from adversarial edges only with the poisoned graph, which is sub-optimal since they fail to discriminate adversarial edges from normal ones. On the other hand, clean graphs from similar domains as the target poisoned graph are usually available in the real world. By perturbing these clean graphs, we create supervised knowledge to train the ability to detect adversarial edges so that the robustness of GNNs is elevated. However, such potential for clean graphs is neglected by existing work. To this end, we investigate a novel problem of improving the robustness of GNNs against poisoning attacks by exploring clean graphs. Specifically, we propose PA-GNN, which relies on a penalized aggregation mechanism that directly restrict the negative impact of adversarial edges by assigning them lower attention coefficients. To optimize PA-GNN for a poisoned graph, we design a meta-optimization algorithm that trains PA-GNN to penalize perturbations using clean graphs and their adversarial counterparts, and transfers such ability to improve the robustness of PA-GNN on the poisoned graph. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the robustness of PA-GNN against poisoning attacks on graphs.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TAC.2023.3269323
