Secure Control of Multiagent Systems Against Malicious Attacks: A Brief Survey

Multiagent systems (MASs) provide an effective means for coordinating spatially distributed and networked agents (or nodes, subsystems) such that the desired cooperative tasks can be accomplished with promising reliability, manipulability, scalability, and efficiency. One key issue in the study of MASs is the design of distributed cooperative control protocol and algorithm that depend on only local and real-time information exchanges among interacting agents over networks. However, network-enabled information sharing and increasing connectivity in practical MASs present several attack factors for malicious adversaries, thereby rendering secure control of MASs fundamentally significant. This article provides a brief survey of systems and control technologies that have been available for addressing different secure control problems of MASs in the face of various malicious attacks. First, attacks on MASs are classified based on different configuration layers. Then, the existing attack models and strategies on communication layer and agent layer are systematically examined, respectively. Furthermore, some typical secure control techniques for MASs that have been employed to handle these attacks are surveyed. Finally, several challenging issues are envisioned for potential future research.