Modern cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as our energy infrastructure, are becoming increasingly complex: An ever-higher share of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based technologies use the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) facet of energy systems for operation optimization, cost efficiency, and to reach CO2 goals worldwide. At the same time, markets with increased flexibility and ever shorter trade horizons enable the multi-stakeholder situation that is emerging in this setting. These systems still form critical infrastructures that need to perform with highest reliability. However, today's CPS are becoming too complex to be analyzed in the traditional monolithic approach, where each domain, e.g., power grid and ICT as well as the energy market, are considered as separate entities while ignoring dependencies and side-effects. To achieve an overall analysis, we introduce the concept for an application of distributed artificial intelligence as a self-adaptive analysis tool that is able to analyze the dependencies between domains in CPS by attacking them. It eschews pre-configured domain knowledge, instead exploring the CPS domains for emergent risk situations and exploitable loopholes in codices, with a focus on rational market actors that exploit the system while still following the market rules.

The notion of cyber-physical systems (CPS) describes the co mbination of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and software (the "cyber" part) with physical compone nts. A CPS can emerge from embedded systems by internetworking them. The first big research program focusi ng on CPS has been started by the US National Science Foundation in 2006, where the term CPS is defined in as such tha t it "refers to the tight conjoining of and coordination between computational and physical resources," stating "[ w]e envision that the cyber-physical systems of tomorrow will far exceed those of today in terms of adaptability, auto nomy, efficiency, functionality, reliability, safety, and usability" [1]. While the notion of CPS by the U.S. National Science Foundati on, as outlined above, includes ICT, it does not explicitly name Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a necessary component to raise an embedded system to the status of a CPS. Y et, the availability of sensory data together with a co mmunications system and the ability to exert actions upon the physical world that have been planned for the whole compo und of embedded systems components readily suggests that issues of planning, the increase of reflectivity, effici ency, and lowering resource usage is achieved by increasing the "intelligence" of the overall system. As such, research ers in the domain of AI have found numerous application domains. However, the two worlds of CPS and AI usually operate on diffe rent terms: CPS require operation within well-defined boundaries, i.e., as far as possible deterministic behavio r within well-known, strictly enforced margins of error. In contrast, many AI techniques--Artificial Neural Networks (A NNs) foremost--are firmly rooted in the domain of statistics, which is probably very well seen in the ANN train ing process.

This paper introduces Adversarial Resilience Learning (ARL), a concept to model, train, and analyze artificial neural networks as representations of competitive agents in highly complex systems. In our examples, the agents normally take the roles of attackers or defenders that aim at worsening or improving-or keeping, respectively-defined performance indicators of the system. Our concept provides adaptive, repeatable, actor-based testing with a chance of detecting previously unknown attack vectors. We provide the constitutive nomenclature of ARL and, based on it, the description of experimental setups and results of a preliminary implementation of ARL in simulated power systems.