Exploiting Local Invariance for Resilient Distributed Average Consensus: Seminar with Speaker Dr. Chris Hadjicostis, University of Cyprus

Abstract:

Recent developments in digital systems and networking technologies have led to the emergence of complex systems that need to be managed/controlled over cyber infrastructures, such as wireless and wired broadband networks. The emergence of this type of network control systems, which range from smart grids and transportation networks of various sorts, to embedded electronic devices and robotic networks, has sparked huge interest in distributed control and coordination problems. In this talk, we present recent progress in this area by focusing on an operation that is key for several such tasks: the distributed computation of the average (more generally, a weighted linear combination) of various parameters held at different agents of a multi-agent system. We discuss challenges pertaining to adversarial network conditions, such as packet drops on the communication links and/or the presence of faulty/malicious agents. In particular, we report on a key local invariant that can be used to perform anytime error detection/correction as well as to collectively remove the effects of previous communication exchanges with agents that are subsequently determined to be faulty/malicious.

Bio:

Christoforos Hadjicostis received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1999 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. In 1999, he joined the Faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the Information Trust Institute. Since 2007, he has been with the University of Cyprus, where he is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Interim Director of the FOSS Research Center on Sustainable Energy. His research focuses on fault diagnosis and tolerance in distributed dynamic systems, discrete event systems, error control coding, and applications to network security and anomaly detection. Dr. Hadjicostis is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems and Senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He is a fellow of IEEE.