Secured Bipartite Consensus Control for Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems Against Hybrid Attacks: A Component-Based WTOD Protocol

Abstract

This article studies the secure bipartite consensus control issue for a nonlinear multi-agent system (MAS) subjected to hybrid attacks. The challenge is to simultaneously consider improving the bandwidth resource utilization of each agent and ensuring secure bipartite consensus. In response to the former, a component-based weighted try-once-discard (WTOD) protocol is proposed, which can save bandwidth resources by selecting the maximum component of each agent’s measurement output instead of only a single agent’s measurement output to transmit to the observer. Different from the previous work, which considered only one single type/channel attack, a unified hybrid attack model is constructed in which aperiodic denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and unknown false data injection (FDI) attacks occur simultaneously in the channels from sensor-to-observer and controller-to-actuator. At this point, a co-estimation strategy is given to estimate the state of agents and the FDI attack signals. Based on this, the observer-based compensation controller is developed to mitigate the impact of FDI attacks based on the feed-forward method. Meanwhile, a set of sufficient conditions is presented to guarantee the existence of such a resilient controller, which can further ensure the underlying system achieves ultimately bounded bipartite consensus. Finally, a simulation example verifies the feasibility and correctness of the proposed method. Note to Practitioners–Nonlinear MASs currently have numerous real-world applications, such as unmanned aerial vehicle formation control and intelligent transportation. Besides the collaborative behavior among agents, antagonistic interactions are also common in the real world. Thus, the research on the bipartite consensus problem would benefit the application of unmanned missions in complex environments. This paper investigates the secure bipartite consensus control problem for a class of nonlinear MAS under hybrid attacks. Notably, these systems are particularly susceptible to various types of cyberattacks. Therefore, it is crucial to mitigate the impact of cyber attacks on nonlinear MAS that rely on communication links for information transmission. To address the challenges posed by simultaneous DoS and FDI attacks occurring in two communication channels, this paper proposes a resilient compensation-based bipartite consensus control scheme for MASs to proactively mitigate the impact of attacks on system performance. Furthermore, a component-based WTOD protocol is proposed to reduce communication resource usage among agents, making the proposed control strategy easier to implement and more user-friendly for control engineers.