Security-aware optimal actuator placement in vehicle platooning

Vehicle platooning, as a large class of cyber‐physical
systems, is prone to be under the risk of cyber attacks. One (or more)
external intelligent intruder(s) might attack one (or more) of the vehicles
participating in a platoon. This paper proposes a general approach to find
an optimal actuator placement strategy according to the Stackelberg game
between the attacker and the defender. The game payoff is the energy needed
by the attacker to steer the consensus follower–leader dynamics of the
system towards his desired direction. The attacker tries to minimize this
energy while the defender attempts to maximize it. Thus, based on the
defined game and its optimal equilibrium point, the defender(s) selects
optimal actuator placement action to face the attacker(s). Both cases of
single attacker–single defender and multiple attackers–multiple defenders
cases are investigated. Furthermore, we study the effects of different
information flow topologies, namely, the unidirectional and bidirectional
data transfer structures. Besides, the impacts of increasing the
connectivity among the nodes on the security level of the platoon are
presented. Simulation results for h–nearest neighbor platoon formations
along with experimental results using the scaled cars governed by robotic
operating system (ROS) verify the effectiveness of the method.