Trust in Human-Cyber-Physical Energy Systems: Vision & State of the Art
Brand, Michael and Tomforde, Sven and Lehnhoff, Sebastian
Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Sustainability Week
Human-cyber-physical energy systems (HCPESs) tightly couple physical infrastructures with information and communication technology (ICT) and human actors. Today, situational awareness in such systems is still limited to the physical system and relies on the assessment of operating conditions from data acquisition. This limited perspective is increasingly inadequate in the presence of complex human-cyber-physical interactions. We argue that computational trust – the capability of a system to quantify and reason about the trustworthiness of other systems and humans – provides a unifying lens for holistic HCPES situational awareness. This vision sees computational trust not only as an auxiliary security mechanism but as a core enabler of resilient and ultimately trustworthy autonomous HCPESs. This paper presents a novel conceptual model that addresses three systems of an HCPES (physical, ICT, human-system interaction) and systematically structures trust along the facets of ability, reliability, and credibility. We survey the state of the art and identify research gaps along a trust process comprising (i) collection of trust-relevant inputs, (ii) their quantification into multifaceted trust values, (iii) trust-based situational awareness, (iv) trust-aware autonomous control, and (v) trust forensics.
2026
inproceedings
Association for Computing Machinery
ACM Sustainability Week '26
31–35
TEN.efzn
Transformation des Energiesystems Niedersachsen
Transformation des Energiesystems Niedersachsen
