Fault Diagnosis of Labeled Petri Nets Under Attacks Using Integer Linear Programming
Tengbo Li, Haiyang Ren, Ruotian Liu, Maria Pia Fanti, Zhiwu Li · IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering · 2025
This paper deals with the online fault diagnosis problem of discrete event systems under malicious external attacks. We consider a scenario where an attacker can intercept certain sensor measurements and alter them arbitrarily, potentially causing a diagnoser to malfunction. In the framework of labeled Petri nets, a novel integer linear programming problem is formulated by introducing binary variables to estimate the possible transition sequences of an observation that may have been tampered with by an attacker. The proposed approach makes two main contributions. The first one is that, by specifying two different objective functions to the integer linear programming problem, we can obtain the diagnosis results in the presence of attacks, which classic diagnosers may fail to achieve; the second is computational efficiency. In the absence of attacks, the proposed approach is experimentally verified to have lower computational overhead compared with the existing results that are based on integer linear programming and those using basis markings. Finally, the proposed approach is illustrated through a manufacturing system for assembling brake valves. Note to Practitioners—Fault diagnosis is critical for highly automated systems such as manufacturing systems, power plants and smart grids. Engineers are familiar with various fault diagnosis techniques in their community. However, malicious attacks in a system are not fully considered when performing fault diagnosis. This research elaborates upon a novel approach to fault diagnosis of discrete event systems modeled by labeled Petri nets, which can perform online fault diagnosis both in the presence and absence of attacks. The approach enables faults to be detected even after certain labels are tampered with by an attacker. The proposed diagnostic vehicle is presented in terms of integer linear programming problems, which facilitates its applications to real systems by practitioners.