Design of Robust, Adaptive and Privacy-Preserving Control Networks

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Control networks connect sensors, actuators and computing devices embedded in our environment to vastly improve our abilities to monitor and regulate the physical world. As these networks become more pervasive and their size and complexity increase, there is a need to further develop the scientific foundations for their principled design, deployment and validation. Indeed, despite recent advances in the field of networked control systems, the gap between the models used to synthesize control systems and the complexity of the embedded platforms on which they are implemented is growing. This gap leads to overly conservative designs and fast increasing costs and delays associated to system development, testing, and maintenance. A second obstacle to the deployment of these ubiquitous embedded networks is the resistance, due to justified privacy concerns, of the individual users who could most benefit from them, as illustrated for example by the installation of smart meters for power control networks. To answer these challenges, this research program proposes new interfaces between control, computing and communication systems enabling their seamless integration while guaranteeing the overall control performance. Moreover, rigorous privacy-preserving mechanisms for large-scale control networks are introduced for the first time, to protect the users who are increasingly responsible for providing the necessary input data and measurements. Applications that will drive this research include the model-based design of avionics systems, intelligent transportation systems, energy-efficient buildings and smart grids. The expected outcome will be a set of theoretical results, design methodologies and software tools that simplify the task of building reliable, cost-effective and high-performance control networks, and applicable to systems of realistic complexity. By integrating the proposed privacy-preserving mechanisms, emerging large-scale control networks will also see increased user participation, thereby accelerating their deployment and improving their efficiency.