Resilience enhancement through a multi-agent approach over cyber-physical systems

Cyber-physical systems are an important component of most industrial infrastructures that allow the integration of control systems with state of the art information technologies. These systems aggregate distinct communication platforms and networked devices with different capabilities. This integration, has brought into play new uncertainties, not only from the tangible physical world, but also from a cyber space perspective. In light of this situation, awareness and resilience are invaluable properties of these kind of systems. The present work proposes an architecture based on a distributed middleware that relying on a hierarchical multi-agent framework for resilience enhancement. The proposed architecture takes into account physical and cyber vulnerabilities and guarantee state and context awareness, and a minimum level of acceptable operation, in response to physical disturbances and malicious attacks. This framework was evaluated on an IPv6 test-bed comprising several distributed devices, where performance and communication links health are analysed. Results from tests prove the relevance and benefits of the proposed approach.