Algorithmic and Graph-Theoretic Approaches to Optimal Sensor Placement in Complex Dynamical Systems

Research Areas: Prevention, Detection and Response

Principal Investigator: Shreyas Sundaram

Modern technology has led to the creation of new types of sensors that provide system operators with unique abilities to monitor or estimate the state of large-scale complex systems. Once sensors are in place, state estimates can be obtained by analyzing data gathered from the deployed sensors together with mathematical models of the system. However, as systems increase in scale and complexity, the deployment of sensors for high quality state estimation remains a bottleneck in a broad spectrum of applications ranging from microprocessors to power distribution networks and societal-scale Internet-of-Things. This project supports the creation of new sensor placement (deployment) algorithms with rigorous performance guarantees. The research will produce a new understanding of the fundamental limitations and achievable performance of sensor placement algorithms, and formulate efficient placement algorithms that perform well in the presence of sensor faults and external attacks.

Personnel

Students: Lintao Ye, Nathaniel Woodford, Aritra Mitra

Representative Publications

L. Ye, S. Roy and S. Sundaram, "On the Complexity and Approximability of Optimal Sensor Selection for Kalman Filtering." Proceedings of the American Control Conference, 2018 (to appear).
A. Mitra and S. Sundaram, "Distributed Observers for LTI Systems." IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2018 (to appear).
A. Mitra and S. Sundaram, "Distributed Functional Observers for LTI Systems." Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Melbourne, Australia, 2017.
H. Zhang, R. Ayoub and S. Sundaram, "Sensor Selection for Kalman Filtering of Linear Dynamical Systems: Complexity, Limitations and Greedy Algorithms." Automatica, vol. 78, pp. 202 - 210, April 2017.
S. Roy, M. Xue and S. Sundaram, “Graph-Theoretic Analysis of Estimators for Stochastically-Driven Diffusive Network Processes.” Proceedings of the American Control Conference, Milwaukee, WI, 2018 (to appear).
N. Woodford and S. Sundaram, “Sensor Selection and Attack for State Estimation of Linear Systems with Unknown Inputs.” Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Miami Beach, FL, 2018 (to appear).
L. Ye, S. Roy and S. Sundaram, “A Graph-Theoretic Approach to Optimal Sensor Placement for Kalman Filtering.” Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Miami Beach, FL, 2018 (to appear).

Keywords: optimization, resilient monitoring, Sensor placement, sensor selection, system monitoring