Physical Safety and Cyber Security Analysis of Multi-Agent Systems : A Survey of Recent Advances

Multi-agent systems (MASs) are typically composed of multiple smart entities with independent sensing, communication, computing, and decision-making capabilities. Nowadays, MASs have a wide range of applications in smart grids, smart manufacturing, sensor networks, and intelligent transportation systems. Control of the MASs are often coordinated through information interaction among agents, which is one of the most important factors affecting coordination and cooperation performance. However, unexpected physical faults and cyber attacks on a single agent may spread to other agents via information interaction very quickly, and thus could lead to severe degradation of the whole system performance and even destruction of MASs. This paper is concerned with the safety/security analysis and synthesis of MASs arising from physical faults and cyber attacks, and our goal is to present a comprehensive survey on recent results on fault estimation, detection, diagnosis and fault-tolerant control of MASs, and cyber attack detection and secure control of MASs subject to two typical cyber attacks. Finally, the paper concludes with some potential future research topics on the security issues of MASs.