A Hierarchical Security Control Framework of Nonlinear CPSs Against DoS Attacks With Application to Power Sharing of AC Microgrids

In this article, we investigate the distributed resilient observers-based decentralized adaptive control problem for cyber-physical systems (CPSs) with time-varying reference trajectory under denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The considered CPSs are modeled as a class of nonlinear multi-input uncertain multiagent systems, which can be used to model an AC microgrid system consisting of distributed generators. When the communication to a subsystem from one of its neighbors is attacked by a DoS attack, the transmitted information is unavailable and the existing distributed adaptive methods used to estimate the bound of the nth-order derivative of the reference trajectory become nonapplicable. To overcome this difficulty, we first design a new distributed estimator for each subsystem to ensure that the magnitude of the state of the estimator is larger than the bound of the nth-order derivative of the reference trajectory after a finite time. By employing the estimator state, a distributed observer with a switching mechanism is proposed. Then, a new block backstepping-based decentralized adaptive controller is developed. Based on the DoS communication duration property, convex design conditions of observer parameters are derived with the Lebesgue integral theory and the average dwell time method. It is proved that the output tracking errors will approach a compact set with the developed method. Finally, the design method is successfully applied to show the effectiveness of the proposed method to solve the power sharing problem for AC microgrids.