Special Section on Resilient and Safe Control in Multi-Agent Systems
Editors:
Luca Schenato
University of Padova
Italy
http://automatica2.dei.unipd.it/people/schenato.html
schenato@dei.unipd.it
Ruggero Carli
University of Padova
Italy
carlirug@dei.unipd.it
Submission Window: 1 Oct 2023 – 1 April 2024 Extended to 30 April 2024
Multi-agent systems (MASs) have gained a lot of popularity in recent years in different disciplines as a means to solve complex tasks by subdividing them into smaller problems. The modular and interconnected structure provides important benefits, like scalability and design flexibility, but can also lead to vulnerability, by allowing local faults to spread to neighboring locations and even to the whole system. This challenge is outside the scope of robust and adaptive control, where the controller typically assumes prior knowledge about disturbances affecting the model. This is especially true for adversarial disturbances, which cannot be modeled with confidence and may fatally disrupt a control task at the global level.
Nonetheless, propagating failures are a crucial issue in several application domains, from power grids subject to cyber-attacks and power outages, to multi-robot systems dealing with unexpected changes in the surrounding environment, to vehicular networks experimenting with unpredictable behaviors of human drivers. These cases require resilient strategies that can restore the system functionalities on-the-fly in the face of unexpected or adversarial conditions that fall outside of the design assumptions.
A unifying framework for resilience in MASs is still lacking, and the complexity of large-scale systems may prevent applicability of several proposed approaches. Ultimately, the path toward resilient networked control systems is still long, and further research and technological effort is needed to cope with adversities of any kind and increasing sophistication.
This special issue aims to contribute to this growing area of interest and calls thus for papers in this topical area.
Topics of interest for this special issue include and are not limited to:
> Resilient-by-design architectures and formal verification
> Reactive resilience architectures and methodologies
> Data-driven and learning-based resilience control
> Self-organizing control architectures
> Resilient multi-agent optimization and federated learning
> Resilient multi-robot systems
> Safety-critical control
> Fault-detection and isolation for networked systems
> Game-theoretic approaches to resilient control
> Resilient multi-agent estimation in sensor networks
> Anomaly-detection/malicious agents detention and mitigation
> Privacy-preserving distributed algorithms
Special Section Schedule:
> Special Section Submission Window: 1 October 2023 – 1 April 2024
> Notification of reviews of and recommendations: 10 weeks after initial submission
> Final notification of regular papers: 20 weeks after initial submission
> Manuscript publication on IEEE Xplore: 24 weeks after initial submission
Submission Site: https://css.paperplaza.net/journals/ojcs/scripts/login.pl
Length: 10-15 pages, not including references. Justification of longer papers is required.
Discounts: The first 8 published papers in this volume of the special section are eligible to receive a 50% discount on article processing charges (APCs).
Guest Senior Editors
Name: Ruggero Carli
Affiliation: University of Padova
Name: Luca Schenato
Affiliation: University of Padova
Guest Associate Editors
Name: Mauro Franceschelli
Affiliation: University of Cagliari
Name: Hideaki Ishii
Affiliation: Tokyo Institute of Technology
Name: Maryam Kamgarpour
Affiliation: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne
Name: Chuchu Fan
Affiliation: MIT
Name: Solmaz Kia
Affiliation: University of California, Irvine
Name: Stephen Smith
Affiliation: University of Waterloo
Name: Pavankumar Tallapragada
Affiliation: Indian Institute of Science
Name: Minghui Zhu
Affiliation: Pennsylvania State University