Biblio

Modern computing networks that enable distributed computing are comprised of a wide range of heterogeneous devices with different levels of resources, which are interconnected by different networking technologies and communication protocols. This integration, together with the state of the art technologies, has brought into play new uncertainties, associated with physical world and the cyber space. In heterogeneous networked control systems environments, awareness and resilience are two important properties that these systems should bear and comply with. In this work the problem of resilience enhancement in heterogeneous networked control systems is addressed based on a distributed middleware, which is propped up on a hierarchical multi-agent framework, where each of the constituent agents is devoted to a specific task. The proposed architecture takes into account physical and cyber vulnerabilities and ensures state and context awareness, and a minimum level of acceptable operational performance, in response to physical and cyber disturbances. Experiments on a IPv6-based test-bed proved the relevance and benefits offered by the proposed architecture.

Advances on the integration of wireless sensor and actuator networks, as a whole, have contribute to the greater reconfigurability of systems and lower installation costs with application to supervision of networked control systems. This integration, however, increases some vulnerabilities associated with the physical world and also with the cyber and security world. This trend makes the wireless nodes one of the most vulnerable component of these kind of systems, which can have a major impact on the overall performance of the networked control system. This paper presents an architecture relying on a hierarchical multi-agent system for resilience enhancement, with focus on wireless sensor and actuator networks. The proposed framework was evaluated on an IPv6 test-bed comprising several distributed devices, where performance and communication links health are analyzed. The relevance of the proposed approach is demonstrated by results collected from the test-bed.