Resilience of connected vehicles: a control-theoretic approach

Biography: Mohammad Pirani is a research assistant professor with the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo. Before that, he held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Toronto (from 2019 to 2021) and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden (2018 to 2019). He received his M.A.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Ph.D. in Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, both from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 2014 and 2017, respectively. His research interests include resilient and secure networked control systems with applications to intelligent transportation systems and multi-agent systems. He is a member of the IEEE-CSS technical committee on smart cities.

Abstract: Recent developments in embedded computing systems, sensor technologies, communication devices, and artificial intelligence has changed the face of driving from completely manual to autonomous and connected vehicles. While this transformation has driven major advancements in efficiency and safety, it has also introduced a range of new potential risks. As the scale of connected vehicles, in both intra and inter-vehicle networks, increases and interactions between different subsystems become more sophisticated, questions of their resilience to a spectrum of failures increase in importance. Human intervention in those systems increases this complexity, especially when it comes in the form of an adversary. In this talk, we first introduce two challenges we face in studying the resilience of connected vehicles: 1) Classical robust and fault-tolerant control techniques may not be sufficient to address the resilience of connected vehicles against certain type of failures, 2) The impact of the underlying vehicle network topology on the resilience of connected vehicles against failures is not well quantified. To address these two challenges, we 1) Extend the concept of fault detection and fault tolerance in control systems to incorporate strategic adversarial actions, using tools from systems theory, game theory, and graph theory, and 2) Reinterpret some notions of resilience in the language of graphs, using tools from graph theory and structured systems theory. Finally, some of our active research projects and industrial collaborations in safe and secure vehicle autonomy will be briefly explained.