Communications for Distributed State Estimation in CPSs With Application in Smart Grids

Topological entropy is a key quantity characterizing the complexity, or the information generation rate, of deterministic dynamical process. It provides the lower bound on the amount of communications for reliable state estimation in cyber physical systems (CPSs). In order to study distributed state estimation in CPSs, product topological entropy, based on product covering and motivated by the theory of communication complexity, is proposed. Three similar definitions of product topological entropy are proposed and compared, which are applied to the evaluation of the communication requirement in distributed system state estimation. Algorithms for numerically and approximately computing the product topological entropy are proposed and then applied in the context of smart grids.