Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Although the concepts and developments on Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) and Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) have been progressively and extensively investigated worldwide since the 1970s and 1980s, respectively, the recent catastrophic crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX8 airplanes in 2019 have again highlighted the necessity and urgency for FDD and FTC research & development and their industrial applications. On the other hand, unmanned systems (USs, including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), Autonomous/Driverless Vehicles (AVs), and other transportation vehicles on the land, on/under the water), Smart Grids (SGs, including winds, solar, and hydro energies etc.), and Smart Cities (SCs) are gaining more and more attention and rapid development during the last few years due to their relatively easy and cost-effective uses in various application tasks directly linking to our daily life for better mobility, cleaner energy and sustainable development while fighting with climate change and global warming issues. These new advancements are benefited significantly from technical advances in communication, computation, control, actuators, sensors, networks and new/smart designs and also linked more to rapidly developed and widely spread Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep neural network learning technologies. Due to a higher level of size and complexity in systems, in particular the added technical challenges due to the involvement of more electronic devices with both hardware and software and with large-scale and distributed networked systems, artificial cyber-attacks through communication networks, along with physical faults, could occur during systems operation, which will all lead to physical damages of the system and thus critical issues on stability, performance, safety, and security of the normal operations of the above-mentioned unmanned systems, smart grids, and smart cities. In this DG project, new developments with systematic theory and new techniques will be developed and extended from the applicant's previous DG grants under a more general system framework of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) with typical Safety & Security (S&S) critical CPSs as development and application examples, such as unmanned systems and smart grids under the big umbrella of future smart cities. The objective is to develop systematic theory and methodologies to handle both physical faults and cyber-attacks potentially occurred in these S&S critical CPSs simultaneously by employing and integrating model-based and AI-based methodologies for making these CPSs smarter, safer, more reliable and more resilient with better intelligence, safety, reliability, and security.