Architectures for Robust Self-Organizing Energy Systems under Information and Control Constraints
Authors: Emilie Frost, Astrid Nieße
Organizations: Department of Computing Science, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Ammerländer Heerstraße 114-118, Oldenburg, Germany · Distributed Artificial Intelligence, OFFIS - Institute for Information Technology, Escherweg 2, Oldenburg, Germany
Abstract
Applying the concept of controlled self-organization in agent-based Cyber-Physical Energy Systems (CPES) is a promising approach to ensure system robustness. By introducing an observer/controller architecture to the system, this concept allows for self-organization while still enabling intervention when disturbances occur. Thus, it is possible to respond to effects of cyber attacks, a major threat to current energy systems. However, when implementing an observer to monitor the system and a controller to execute actions for controlled self-organization in CPES, it is essential to take into account restrictions on information and actions resulting from the privacy of local distributed energy resources, regulatory constraints, and data exchange requirements. For this reason, this paper presents architecture variants for the observer and controller that take into account restrictions on access to information and limited actions. In addition, it evaluates possible controller actions in various architectures. The results underscore the importance of considering observer/controller architectures when designing agent-based systems to ensure their robustness for real-world applications.
Agentic systems involved in high-stake decision-making under adversarial pressure need formal guarantees not offered by existing approaches. Motivated by the operational needs of security operations centers (SOCs) that must configure endpoint detection and response (EDR) policies under adversarial pressure, we present a tool-mediated architecture: LLM agents use deterministic tools (Stackelberg best-response, Bayesian observer updates, attack-graph primitives) and select from finite action catalogs enforced at the tool-output interface. A composite Lyapunov function machine-checked in Lean 4 with zero sorry certifies controllability, observability from asymmetric sensor data, and Input-to-State Stability (ISS) robustness under intelligent adversarial disturbance, with two corollaries extending the certificate to any controller or adversary from the catalogs. On 282 real enterprise attack graphs, the claims hold with margin. On paired offensive/defensive telemetry, a tool-mediated Claude Sonnet 4 controller reduces the attacker's expected payoff (game value) by 59% relative to a deterministic greedy baseline, with zero variance across 40 runs at four temperatures. A Claude Haiku 4.5 controller converges to suboptimal game values but stays catalog-bounded over an additional 40 runs, demonstrating that architectural stability is not dependent on the controller capability. The LLM agent's non-determinism furthers creative exploration of strategies, while the tool-mediated architecture ensures system stability.
This work studies resilient output containment for heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems with actuator cyber-attacks over directed network topologies. The leaders generate bounded locally absolutely continuous trajectories; however, their dynamics, velocity bounds, and motion envelopes are undisclosed to the followers. The cyber-attack model includes state- and input-correlated, as well as bounded exogenous actuator false-data terms. A continuous two-layer adaptive control architecture is proposed. The first layer is a virtual-actuator reconfiguration layer that uses partial state measurements to compensate for actuator attacks in the local tracking-error dynamics. The second layer is a network interface that generates task-space commands via an adaptive interaction protocol. This protocol uses only neighbor-exchanged network-interface states whose dimensions match those of the plant output, and it does not require global graph knowledge for parameter tuning. For directed graphs, under a leader-rooted united spanning-tree condition, a nonsmooth Lyapunov analysis yields asymptotic containment at the command level. The physical outputs then converge to the leader convex hull up to a residual determined by the command-tracking local controllers. Simulation results using a network of quadrotors with damped suspended loads illustrate the performance of attack recovery and containment tracking.
In embodied cyber-physical systems, active cyberattacks pose an immediate threat not just to data, but to physical integrity and human safety. While existing security approaches excel at detection, they lack the runtime mechanisms to determine whether a disruption is tolerable or if performance degradation remains within safe operational bounds. This gap leaves autonomous systems vulnerable to graceful failure paralysis, where they cannot distinguish between a safe, degraded state and a catastrophic hazard during an ongoing attack. This paper presents RobResilience, an implementation of a formal resilience framework for embodied cyber-physical systems in a Webots simulation environment, using a PR2 robot and ROS2. The framework evaluates three predicates at runtime: tolerable disruption (δ), tolerable degradation (γ), and mitigation feasibility (μ), over a compromised device set derived from IDS confidence scores. When resilience is lost, the framework triggers available mitigation strategies. We evaluate our implementation through eight attack scenarios that systematically cover all possible combinations of the predicate state space, varying attack targets, degradation rates, and mitigation availability. Results confirm that the runtime behaviour of the implementation is consistent with the theoretical definitions.