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 control systems. I will demonstrate how consensus and consistent real-time views can be achieved 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.

About Yvonne-Anne Pignolet

Dr. Yvonne-Anne Pignolet is a Principal Scientist at ABB Corporate Research, Switzerland, where she leads and contributes to projects in distributed systems and networking for automation. While the application domains vary, her work is centered around the efficient design, engineering and operation of networked systems. Before joining ABB in 2011, she was a post-doctoral researcher at IBM Research Zurich Laboratory, Switzerland, working on wireless sensor nodes, and at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel, studying complex network evolution. She completed her PhD in distributed computing 2006-2009 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Roger Wattenhofer at ETH Zurich.

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This event will be conducted in English