The ideas presented in this paper are summarized as follows. The first idea entails improving the security of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) architectures by means of asymmetric cryptography and digital signatures and measuring the performance overhead. This allows achieving some obvious subsequent goals such as data-origin authentication, and the traceability and implicit non-repudiation of commands given to intelligent field and direct control equipment. The possibility to include digital signatures with a minimum impact on a standard and a reliable data communication protocol, such as Distributed Network Protocol version 3 (DNP3), also known to have a mature, industrially validated, open-source implementation, has been tested and the results are presented. A second idea concerns designing and developing a multitenant cloud-based architecture for a SCADA environment. This hypothesis focuses on certain SCADA operators that manage multiple industrial control systems (ICS) and intend to consolidate process data in a centralized manner.

In the last years the European Space Agency (ESA) has developed several programs that support the creation of small satellites, called CubeSats, by different universities from within the member states. Because of their limited size, those satellites can pack, at most, very small attitude control devices which can generate only some limited torque. It is thus important for the designers to be able to estimate the effects of environmental torques on the attitude of their satellites in order to either correctly select the best suitable attitude control equipment or to harvest the effects of external torques in their favor. This paper presents a software package that can estimate the effect of the environmental torques on the attitude of a CubeSat in Earth's orbit.

This research investigates the problem of robust control of a nonlinear, fast-dynamics, high-precision planar manipulator with a limited workspace. Starting from a mathematical model formulated in terms of Euler-Lagrange dynamics, the proposed approach considers, given the limitations of the physical system, that some states are unavailable for direct measurement, and the system is perturbed by external disturbances. Consequently, a reduced-order state observer and an estimator with time-varying gains are proposed. Using these estimates in the control stage, four types of control laws are synthesized. Two are derived from super-twisting control theory (STC), the third is an integer-order PID (IOPID) controller, and the fourth is based on a fractional-order PID (FOPID) approach with optimization-based tuning. The first three strategies require accurate information about the mathematical model of the system. All the considered control strategies address external perturbations to ensure the robustness of the system. Several tests have been conducted to validate the overall estimation and control scheme. Based on the dynamic evolution of the manipulator tip and the analyzed performance metrics, the numerical results show that all the proposed controllers provide suitable solutions to robust tracking problems.