Green Resilience of Cyber-Physical Systems: Doctoral Dissertation
This work addresses the trade-off between resilience and energy consumption for cyber-physical systems like collaborative robots, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to this specific domain.
This research tackled the problem of balancing resilience and energy efficiency (greenness) in online collaborative AI systems (OL-CAIS) by developing the GResilience framework with policies like reinforcement learning, which improved recovery time and performance stability while slightly increasing CO2 emissions, and found that containerization halved CO2 emissions.
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) combine computational and physical components. Online Collaborative AI System (OL-CAIS) is a type of CPS that learn online in collaboration with humans to achieve a common goal, which makes it vulnerable to disruptive events that degrade performance. Decision-makers must therefore restore performance while limiting energy impact, creating a trade-off between resilience and greenness. This research addresses how to balance these two properties in OL-CAIS. It aims to model resilience for automatic state detection, develop agent-based policies that optimize the greenness-resilience trade-off, and understand catastrophic forgetting to maintain performance consistency. We model OL-CAIS behavior through three operational states: steady, disruptive, and final. To support recovery during disruptions, we introduce the GResilience framework, which provides recovery strategies through multi-objective optimization (one-agent), game-theoretic decision-making (two-agent), and reinforcement learning (RL-agent). We also design a measurement framework to quantify resilience and greenness. Empirical evaluation uses real and simulated experiments with a collaborative robot learning object classification from human demonstrations. Results show that the resilience model captures performance transitions during disruptions, and that GResilience policies improve green recovery by shortening recovery time, stabilizing performance, and reducing human dependency. RL-agent policies achieve the strongest results, although with a marginal increase in CO2 emissions. We also observe catastrophic forgetting after repeated disruptions, while our policies help maintain steadiness. A comparison with containerized execution shows that containerization cuts CO2 emissions by half. Overall, this research provides models, metrics, and policies that ensure the green recovery of OL-CAIS.