Secure Dynamic Nonlinear Heterogeneous Vehicle Platooning: Denial-of-Service Cyber-Attack Case

Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs), as a large class of cyber-physical systems, have recently emerged as an effective autonomous driving mechanism in intelligent transportation systems in terms of improvement in safety, fuel economy, road throughput, and driving comfort. This chapter deals with a Secure Distributed Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (Secure–DNMPC) algorithm consisting of (i) detection and (ii) mitigation phases to securely control a string of CAVs, namely vehicle platoons. The approach ensures the desired control performance of a nonlinear heterogeneous platoon equipped by different communication topologies under the premise of the existence of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. The proposed method is also capable of providing safe and secure control of dynamic platoons in which arbitrary vehicles might perform cut-in and/or cut-out maneuvers. Convergence time and stability analysis of the system are also investigated in some cases. Furthermore, to handle DoS attacks modeled by an exceeding time delay in inter-vehicular data transmission, we propose the integration of an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) design within the controller resulting in a novel Secure–DNMPC–UKF co-design. This, in essence, estimates the delayed system states and feeds the predicted values to the Secure–DNMPC, which efficiently mitigates the attack effects. Simulation results demonstrate the fruitfulness of the proposed method.