Security‐aware optimal actuator placement in vehicle platooning

Abstract

AbstractVehicle platooning, as a large class of cyber‐physical systems, is prone to be under the risk of cyber attacks. One (or more) external intelligent intruder(s) might attack one (or more) of the vehicles participating in a platoon. This paper proposes a general approach to find an optimal actuator placement strategy according to the Stackelberg game between the attacker and the defender. The game payoff is the energy needed by the attacker to steer the consensus follower–leader dynamics of the system towards his desired direction. The attacker tries to minimize this energy while the defender attempts to maximize it. Thus, based on the defined game and its optimal equilibrium point, the defender(s) selects optimal actuator placement action to face the attacker(s). Both cases of single attacker–single defender and multiple attackers–multiple defenders cases are investigated. Furthermore, we study the effects of different information flow topologies, namely, the unidirectional and bidirectional data transfer structures. Besides, the impacts of increasing the connectivity among the nodes on the security level of the platoon are presented. Simulation results for h–nearest neighbor platoon formations along with experimental results using the scaled cars governed by robotic operating system (ROS) verify the effectiveness of the method.