ABSTRACT:

The goal of this talk is to address the challenges in the design and analysis of resilient cyber-physical systems. We aim to establish a comprehensive theoretical framework that can serve as the foundation for resilience engineering. Our approach starts with a hierarchical viewpoint toward complex systems that comprise multiple agents and multiple layers. Game-theoretic frameworks can be developed at each layer to model its pivotal functionality. Such frameworks can be further extended to include cross-layer influences between the layers. We apply zero-sum differential game theory to the physical and control layers for robust control design, and applied competitive Markov decision processes (MDPs) to the cyber level for the design of effective cyber security policies. The coupling between the two game-theoretic frameworks leads to a cross-layer control and cyber policy design. This holistic approach enables a game-theoretic gestaltism on resilient system analysis and design.

BIOGRAPHY:

Mr. Quanyan Zhu is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with Prof. Tamer Basar in the Information Trust Institute (ITI). He received Master's and Bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto and McGill University, respectively. He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Waterloo, the University of Avignon, INRIA-Sophia Antipolis, the University of Houston, Idaho National Laboratory, SUPELEC, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is interested in problems at the interface of the cyber and physical worlds and uses tools such as optimal/stochastic control, reinforcement learning, statistical mechanics, and game theory to deal with security and resilience issues in communication networks, biological systems, smart grids, and control systems. He is the author of the book Game-Theoretical Modeling of WDM Optical Networks: Design, Analysis and Algorithms. He is the recipient of an NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship, a University of Toronto Fellowship, an Ernest A. Reid Fellowship, and Mavis Future Faculty Fellowships. He is the organizer of the resilient control system tutorial at CPSWEEK 2012 and the 1st Midwest Workshop on Control and Game Theory (WCGT). He also serves as the TPC Chair of the 2012 1st INFOCOM Workshop on Communications and Control for Sustainable Energy Systems (CCSES).