Gabriele Oliva

Gabriele Oliva, Andrea Tomei, Roberto Setola

Maritime anomaly detection is essential for navigational safety and for the protection of critical underwater infrastructure. This paper proposes a geometry-informed supervised framework for detecting anomalous vessel trajectories in the Baltic Sea using Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. A Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) is constructed over the navigable maritime domain and used as a structural prior to project trajectories onto feasible corridors. This representation enables the extraction of interpretable voyage-level features capturing route efficiency, geometric deviation from nominal paths, kinematic variability, and proximity to submarine cables. To address the scarcity of labeled anomalous events, synthetic anomalies are generated through controlled trajectory perturbations and infrastructure-aware distortions, producing a balanced dataset for supervised training. A Random Forest classifier is trained on the resulting feature set and evaluated under cross-validation and a held-out test split. Experimental results show stable generalization performance, achieving a test ROC AUC of 0.837, indicating the effectiveness of embedding navigational feasibility constraints into the anomaly detection process. The proposed approach provides an interpretable and operationally relevant framework for infrastructure-aware maritime monitoring in geometrically complex environments.

Camilla Fioravanti, Bianca Mazza, Marta Menci et al.

Submarine power and telecommunication cables constitute critical global infrastructure, yet they remain vulnerable to mechanical damage caused by maritime activities and intentional tampering. Continuous monitoring of these assets is therefore essential for early detection of anomalous events. This paper proposes a model-based framework for real-time anomaly detection in submarine cables using spatially distributed deformation measurements along the cable. The cable is modeled as a tensioned structure governed by a damped wave equation with fixed boundary conditions. A finite-dimensional state-space representation is obtained through spatial discretization, enabling the use of a Kalman filter to estimate the cable's dynamic state under stochastic environmental disturbances. Anomaly detection is then formulated as a statistical hypothesis test applied to the innovation sequence of the filter. Compared with purely data-driven alarms, the proposed framework provides an interpretable residual signal whose threshold can be related to a prescribed false-alarm probability. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed framework can reliably identify localized disturbances while remaining robust to ambient environmental excitation.

Gabriele Oliva, Stefano Panzieri, Federica Pascucci et al.

Localization is a fundamental task for sensor networks. Traditional network construction approaches allow to obtain localized networks requiring the nodes to be at least tri-connected (in 2D), i.e., the communication graph needs to be globally rigid. In this paper we exploit, besides the information on the neighbors sensed by each robot/sensor, also the information about the lack of communication among nodes. The result is a framework where the nodes are required to be bi-connected and the communication graph has to be rigid. This is possible considering a novel typology of link, namely Shadow Edges, that account for the lack of communication among nodes and allow to reduce the uncertainty associated to the position of the nodes.

Eduardo Montijano, Gabriele Oliva, Andrea Gasparri

Measures of node centrality that describe the importance of a node within a network are crucial for understanding the behavior of social networks and graphs. In this paper, we address the problems of distributed estimation and control of node centrality in undirected graphs with asymmetric weight values. In particular, we focus our attention on $α$-centrality, which can be seen as a generalization of eigenvector centrality. In this setting, we first consider a distributed protocol where agents compute their $α$-centrality, focusing on the convergence properties of the method; then, we combine the estimation method with a consensus algorithm to achieve a consensus value weighted by the influence of each node in the network. Finally, we formulate an $α$-centrality control problem which is naturally decoupled and, thus, suitable for a distributed setting and we apply this formulation to protect the most valuable nodes in a network against a targeted attack, by making every node in the network equally important in terms of α-centrality. Simulations results are provided to corroborate the theoretical findings.

Stefano Panzieri, Gabriele Oliva, Roberto Setola

In this paper the Distributed Consensus and Synchronization problems with fuzzy-valued initial conditions are introduced, in order to obtain a shared estimation of the state of a system based on partial and distributed observations, in the case where such a state is affected by ambiguity and/or vagueness. The Discrete-Time Fuzzy Systems (DFS) are introduced as an extension of scalar fuzzy difference equations and some conditions for their stability and representation are provided. The proposed framework is then applied in the field of Critical Infrastructures; the consensus framework is used to represent a scenario where human operators, each able to observe directly the state of a given infrastructure (or of a given area considering vast and geographically dispersed infrastructures), reach an agreement on the overall situation, whose severity is expressed in a linguistic, fuzzy way; conversely synchronization is used to provide a distributed interdependency estimation system, where an array of interdependency models is synchronized via partial observation.

Gabriele Oliva, Stefano Panzieri, Roberto Setola

In this paper the linear and stationary Discrete-time systems with state variables and dynamic coefficients represented by fuzzy numbers are studied, providing some stability criteria, and characterizing the bounds of the set of solutions in the case of positive systems.

Gabriele Oliva, Bianca Mazzà, Roberto Setola

Modern maritime navigation and control systems rely on digital sensing, estimation, and communication pipelines that fuse GNSS, radar, inertial, and AIS data through approaches such as Kalman-filter-based estimators. While these technologies are essential for safety and efficiency, their growing interconnection also exposes vessels to faults and cyber-physical anomalies. This paper introduces a Statistical Detection Suite (SDS) to detect malicious stealthy disturbances. Specifically, the SDS operates directly on the innovations of Kalman filters, providing a lightweight yet statistically grounded layer of anomaly monitoring within maritime estimation frameworks. The SDS jointly evaluates whitened innovations through four complementary checks: (i) bias, (ii) covariance consistency via the normalized innovation squared (NIS), (iii) Gaussianity, and (iv) temporal independence via portmanteau statistics. The analysis further examines how an adversary can craft stealthy finite-impulse-response (FIR) Gaussian disturbances that can evade classical chi-square checks, formulating an optimization-based design that balances stealth and trajectory impact. An evaluation in maritime navigation scenarios illustrates how the SDS exposes colored spoofing attacks that bypass traditional methods, highlighting the role of innovation-based monitoring in strengthening maritime resilience against cyber-physical threats.

Gabriele Oliva, Andrea Gasparri, Adriano Fagiolini et al.

In this paper we present a novel distributed coverage control framework for a network of mobile agents, in charge of covering a finite set of points of interest (PoI), such as people in danger, geographically dispersed equipment or environmental landmarks. The proposed algorithm is inspired by C-Means, an unsupervised learning algorithm originally proposed for non-exclusive clustering and for identification of cluster centroids from a set of observations. To cope with the agents' limited sensing range and avoid infeasible coverage solutions, traditional C-Means needs to be enhanced with proximity constraints, ensuring that each agent takes into account only neighboring PoIs. The proposed coverage control framework provides useful information concerning the ranking or importance of the different PoIs to the agents, which can be exploited in further application-dependent data fusion processes, patrolling, or disaster relief applications.

Gabriele Oliva, Roberto Setola, Christoforos N. Hadjicostis

In this paper we provide a fully distributed implementation of the k-means clustering algorithm, intended for wireless sensor networks where each agent is endowed with a possibly high-dimensional observation (e.g., position, humidity, temperature, etc.) The proposed algorithm, by means of one-hop communication, partitions the agents into measure-dependent groups that have small in-group and large out-group "distances". Since the partitions may not have a relation with the topology of the network--members of the same clusters may not be spatially close--the algorithm is provided with a mechanism to compute the clusters'centroids even when the clusters are disconnected in several sub-clusters.The results of the proposed distributed algorithm coincide, in terms of minimization of the objective function, with the centralized k-means algorithm. Some numerical examples illustrate the capabilities of the proposed solution.