Trust-Based Distributed State Estimation in the Presence of Cyber-Attacks Tested With Hardware-in-the-Loop

This letter tackles the problem of estimating the state of a plant when communications are corrupted by cyber-attacks or sensor faults occur. An observer structure based on multi-hop subspace decomposition is proposed, which allows each agent to identify its observable and unobservable subspaces and to reconstruct them based on its own measurements and on the information exchanged with the rest of agents. To deal with cyber-attacks, this letter proposes a method based on weighting the information provided by agents according to an assessment of its trustworthiness. An algorithm to dynamically adjust the weighting parameters is provided and the performance of the proposed technique is assessed using a hardware-in-the-loop platform.