Secure Output-Feedback Control of Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems for Emergency Medical Services Under Stealthy Attacks

The rapid integration of cyber-physical systems (CPS) in urban transportation networks has revolutionized emergency medical services (EMS), enhancing response time and resource allocation. However, this interconnectedness exposes critical infrastructure to sophisticated cyber-attacks, potentially compromising patient safety and operational efficiency. The aim of this work is to develop a secure and efficient control method for EMS in transportation CPS (T-CPS) that can maintain optimal performance while defending against sophisticated, stealthy cyber-attacks. We propose a novel secure output-feedback control method for EMS (SOFC-EMS) in T-CPS that leverages the Kullback-Leibler divergence to characterize attack stealthiness and employs dynamic output-feedback control to maintain system stability and performance. Our approach utilizes ellipsoidal invariant reachable sets to analyze system behavior under various attack scenarios and optimizes controller parameters through convex optimization techniques. Simulation results show that the proposed SOFC-EMS method significantly reduces the reachable set volume, indicating improved system security. The method also performs better in practical EMS scenarios, reducing average ambulance response time and maintaining higher system safety scores under increasing attack frequencies. We demonstrate the method’s adaptability to different urban traffic patterns and attack intensities through consistent performance across various system parameters. While our simulations demonstrate promising results in a simplified urban grid, further research is needed to validate the method’s effectiveness in more complex, real-world urban environments.