Guarantees despite Lossy Communication Links

Over the past decades, large-scale and decentralized cyber-physical systems (CPS) have emerged, benefiting from the commoditization of computation, sensing and communication. To exploit this trend in critical infrastructure such as the electricity distribution grid and industrial control networks, the specific requirements with respect to real-time and dependability guarantees need to be taken into account. In this talk, I will show how to address this challenge with distributed computing building blocks tailored to the limitations and requirements of networked cyber-physical control systems. I will demonstrate how consensus and consistent real-time views of a CPS can be achieved despite despite communication problems and failures of some components. In the first part of my talk, I present theoretical abstractions which are simple enough to allow for algorithmic reasoning, yet realistic enough to produce results real-time systems can rely on. In a second part, I discuss their implementation for an ABB control framework, designed for low and medium voltage grid automation systems.