PhD Studentship: Designing Safe & Secure Control Architectures for Cyber Physical Aerospace Systems

This PhD studentship is a part of Rolls-Royce sponsored research centre developing advanced control systems to enhance the performance and efficiency of new aerospace propulsion systems. We apply a systems thinking mindset with robust mathematical frameworks to solve real world problems with our industrial collaborators at Rolls-Royce. Over the past 30 years, we have designed and introduced new control laws into Trent gas turbine engines and developed algorithms monitoring fleets of 100s of engines flying all around the world.

During the PhD, you will have the opportunity to deeply engage with Academics in the School of EEE and  benefit from close interaction with Rolls-Royce engineers to develop problem understanding, innovate solutions and build transferable expertise.

Modern engineered systems, spanning domains from automotive and avionics to healthcare, increasingly rely on distributed and multi-layered control architectures. These systems comprise interconnected computing nodes, actuators and sensors, communicating over networks, to achieve complex functionalities, at both slow and fast timeframes, and at different safety criticalities. Future connectivity of the next generation of multiple-criticality control architectures will allow almost unlimited off-board computational power to be used to optimise operational decision-making in near to real-time. Safety will remain paramount. New tools and techniques will be needed to design architectures the next generation of resilient systems under this increased complexity and growing risks from cyber-attacks.  

The focus of the PhD project is to identify vulnerable parts of the system for attacks, model  faults and attack risks, and develop new control architectures that mitigates them towards achieving operational resilience throughout their life. Your PhD will build upon state-of-the-art techniques to address the key challenges from our industrial partners in a structured manner, for example: What type and severity of fault and attack can be tolerated and still guarantee system performance and safety? What new security features are needed to enhance the resilience of the  controlled system?

To analyse and design complex systems in a feasibly scalable way, hierarchical and composable analysis and design is needed.  The project will leverage tools from contract-based design theory to formalise such security and performance guarantees at multiple resolutions.  Architectures hierarchically synthesised from subsystems will meet these guarantees under different function input uncertainty, environment and resource assumptions. Security and control measures, as sentry and reversionary functions, will be formally defined and used in the architecture synthesis to allow assumption relaxation to be traded for increased performance. There is an opportunity to demonstrate your theoretical results with real embedded system demonstrators.

A successful outcome of the project is a methodology for distributed control architecture design resulting in resilient aerospace propulsion systems, thus impacting new product designs with our industrial collaborators.

Eligibility

Minimum 2.1 undergraduate honours degree and/or MSc degree with Merit in a relevant science or engineering subject.

It will be an advantage if candidates have an interest in optimisation, control and computing systems, model checking, mathematical logic and good programming skills, ideally in MATLAB, Python and/or C/C++.

Fully funded 3.5 year studentship covering Home tuition fees only, enhanced stipend covering the basic UKRI rate plus an additional £4,000, totalling £24.8k plus inflation per annum. A research and training support grant of £1,000 per annum to cover research expenses and conference attendance. 

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