Abstract
The objective of this research is to develop methods for the operation and design of cyber physical systems in general, and energy efficient buildings in particular. The approach is to use an integrated framework: create models of complex systems from data; then design the associated sensing-communication-computation-control system; and finally create distributed estimation and control algorithms, along with execution platforms to implement these algorithms. A special emphasis is placed on adaptation. In particular, buildings and their environments change with time, as does the way in which buildings are used. The system must be designed to detect and respond to such changes.
The proposed research brings together ideas from control theory, dynamical systems, stochastic processes, and embedded systems to address design and operation of complex cyber physical systems that were previously thought to be intractable. These approaches provide qualitative understanding of system behavior, algorithms for control, and their implementation in a networked execution platform. Insights gained by the application of model reduction and adaptation techniques will lead to significant developments in the underlying theory of modeling and control of complex systems.
The research is expected to directly impact US industry through the development of integrated software-hardware solutions for smart buildings. Collaborations with United Technologies Research Center are planned to enhance this impact. The techniques developed are expected to apply to other complex cyber-physical systems with uncertain dynamics, such as the electric power grid. The project will enhance engineering education through the introduction of cross-disciplinary courses.
Performance Period: 03/01/2010 - 02/28/2014
Institution: University of Florida
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 0931885
Project URL
Abstract
The objective of this research is to understand how pervasive information changes energy production, distribution and use. The design of a more scalable and flexible electric infrastructure, encouraging efficient use, integrating local generation, and managing demand through awareness of energy availability and use over time, is investigated. The approach is to develop a cyber overlay on the energy distribution system in its physical manifestations: machine rooms, buildings, neighborhoods, isolated generation islands and regional grids. A scaled series of experimental energy networks will be constructed, to demonstrate monitoring, negotiation protocols, control algorithms and Intelligent Power Switches integrating information and energy flows in a datacenter, building, renewable energy: farm", and off-grid village. These will be generalized and validated through larger scale simulations. The proposal's intellectual merit is in understanding broadly how information enables energy efficiencies: through intelligent matching of loads to sources, via various levels of aggregation, and by managing how and when energy is delivered to demand, adapted in time and form to available supply. Bi-directional information exchange is integrated everywhere that power is transferred. Broader impacts include training diverse students, such as undergraduates and underrepresented groups, in a new interdisciplinary curriculum in information and energy technologies. Societal impact is achieved by demonstrating dramatic reductions in the carbon footprint of energy and its overall usage, greater penetration of renewables while avoiding additional fossil fuel plants, and shaping a new culture of energy awareness and management. The evolution of Computer Science will be accelerated to meet the challenges of cyber-physical information processing.
Randy Katz
Randy Howard Katz received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1983, where since 1996 he has been the United Microelectronics Corporation Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2007, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki. He has published over 250 refereed technical papers, book chapters, and books. His textbook, Contemporary Logic Design, has sold over 100,000 copies in two editions, and has been used at over 200 colleges and universities. He has supervised 49 M.S. theses and 39 Ph.D. dissertations (including one ACM Dissertation Award winner and ten women). His recognitions include thirteeen best paper awards (including one "test of time" paper award and one selected for a 50 year retrospective on IEEE Communicationspublications), three best presentation awards, the Outstanding Alumni Award of the Computer Science Division, the CRA Outstanding Service Award, the Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, the CS Division's Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Decoration, the IEEE Reynolds Johnson Information Storage Award, the ASEE Frederic E. Terman Award, the IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal, the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, and the ACM Sigmobile Outstanding Contributor Award. In the late 1980s, with colleagues at Berkeley, he developed Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), a $15 billion per year industry sector. While on leave for government service in 1993-1994, he established whitehouse.gov and connected the White House to the Internet. His BARWAN Project of the mid-1990s introduced vertical handoffs and efficient transport protocols for mobile wireless networks. His current research interests are the architecture of Internet Datacenters, particularly frameworks for datacenter-scale instrumentation and resource management. With David Culler and Seth Sanders, he has started a new research project on Smart Energy Networks, called LoCal. Prior research interests have included: database management, VLSI CAD, high performance multiprocessor (Snoop cache coherency protocols) and storage (RAID) architectures, transport (Snoop TCP) and mobility protocols spanning heterogeneous wireless networks, and converged data and telephony network and service architectures.
Performance Period: 09/01/2009 - 08/31/2013
Institution: University of California at Berkeley
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 0932209
Project URL
Project URL
Abstract
Effective response and adaptation to the physical world, and rigorous management of such behaviors through programmable computational means, are mandatory features of cyber physical systems (CPS). However, achieving such capabilities across diverse application requirements surpasses the current state of the art in system platforms and tools. Current computational platforms and tools often treat physical properties individually and in isolation from other cyber and physical attributes. They do not adequately support the expression, integration, and enforcement of system properties that span cyber and physical domains. This results in inefficient use of both cyber and physical resources, and in lower system effectiveness overall. This work investigates novel approaches to these important problems, based on modularizing and integrating diverse cyber-physical concerns that cross-cut physical, hardware, instruction set, kernel, library, and application abstractions. The three major thrusts of this research are 1) establishing foundational models for expressing, analyzing, enforcing, and measuring different conjoined cyber-physical properties, 2) conducting a fundamental re-examination of system development tools and platforms to identify how different application concerns that cut across them can be modularized as cyber-physical system aspects, and 3) developing prototype demonstrations of our results to evaluate further those advances in the state of the art in aspect-oriented techniques for CPS, to help assess the feasibility of broader application of the approach. The broader impact of this work will be through dissemination of academic papers, and open platforms and tools that afford unprecedented integration of cyber-physical properties.
Performance Period: 09/01/2010 - 09/30/2014
Institution: Washington University
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 1060093
Abstract
The objective of this project is to investigate fundamental issues in network control and distributed coordination of wireless sensor and robotic networks. The study of these cyber-physical systems is important as they find wide applicability in several applications areas including environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and health care. The approach is to exploit intrinsic properties of such systems to ensure stability, high performance, scalability and modularity despite the deleterious network effects.
With respect to intellectual merit, the proposed effort has the potential to lead to a transformational change in the understanding of the mechanisms for delay instability and spatio-temporal synchronization in cyber-physical systems. It is expected that this understanding will help in solving the delay-instability, synchronization, and coordination problems in wireless sensor and robotic networks without sacrificing the performance, scalability, or modularity of the system. Specific expected outcomes include a framework for designing control algorithms for robotic systems with input/output communication delays, a communication management module for addressing medium access delays and data losses, synchronization algorithms for real-time coordination between robotic systems, and a scheme for ensuring clock synchronization.
With respect to broader impacts, the project has the potential to impact the broad area of wireless sensor and actuator networks that are important in several domains. One graduate student and an undergraduate student directly benefit from the research and it is expected that several undergraduate and graduate students will benefit from the enriched curricula at University of Maryland. High school students from underrepresented groups are included in the research effort through the University of Maryland's ESTEEM program.
Performance Period: 09/01/2009 - 08/31/2012
Institution: University of Maryland College Park
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 0931661
Abstract
The objective of the proposed research program is to develop, for the first time, the theory and methods needed for the design of networked control systems for chemical processes and demonstrate their application and effectiveness in the context of process systems of industrial importance.
The proposed approach to achieving this objective involves the development of a novel mathematical framework based on nonlinear asynchronous systems to model the sensor and actuator network behavior accounting explicitly for the effect of asynchronous and delayed measurements, network communication and actuation. Within the proposed asynchronous systems framework, novel control methods will be developed for the design of nonlinear networked control systems that improve closed-loop stability, performance and robustness. The controller design methods will be based on nonlinear and predictive control theory and will have provable closed-loop properties.
The development and implementation of networked control methods which take advantage of sensor and actuator networks is expected to significantly improve the operation and performance of chemical processes, increase process safety and reliability, and minimize the negative economic impact of process failures, thereby impacting directly the US economy. The integration of the research results into advanced-level classes in process control and the writing of a new book on ``Networked Process Control'' will benefit students and researchers in the field. The development of software, short courses and workshops and the on-going interaction of the PIs with an industrial consortium will be the means for transferring the results of this research into the industrial sector. Furthermore, the involvement of a diverse group of undergraduate and graduate students in the research will be pursued.
Performance Period: 09/01/2009 - 08/31/2013
Institution: University of California-Los Angeles
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 0930746
Abstract
The objective of this research is to address issues related to the platform revolution leading to a third generation of networked control systems. The approach is to address four fundamental issues: (i) How to provide delay guarantees over communication networks to support networked control? (ii) How to synchronize clocks over networks so as to enable consistent and timely control actions? (iii) What is an appropriate architecture to support mechanisms for reliable yet flexible control system design? (iv) How to provide cross-domains proofs of proper performance in both cyber and physical domains?
Intellectual Merit: Currently neither theory nor networking protocols provide solutions for communication with delay constraints. Coordination by time is fundamental to the next generation of event-cum-time-driven systems that cyber-physical systems constitute. Managing delays and timing in architecture is fundamental for cyberphysical systems.
Broader Impact: Process, aerospace, and automotive industries rely critically on feedback control loops. Any platform revolution will have major consequences. Enabling control over networks will give rise to new large scale applications, e.g., the grand challenge of developing zero-fatality highway systems, by networking cars traveling on a highway. This research will train graduate students on this new technology of networked control. The Convergence Lab (i) has employed minority undergraduate students, including a Ron McNair Scholar, as well as other undergraduate and high school researchers, (ii) hosts hundreds of high/middle/elementary school students annually in Engineering Open House. The research results will be presented at conferences and published in open literature.
Performance Period: 09/15/2010 - 04/30/2012
Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 1035378
Abstract
The objective of this research is considering security and timing as primary concerns, re-envisioning computer architecture and network algorithms to provide a robust foundation for CPS. The approach is rethinking the hardware and software divide, providing true process concurrency and isolation. Extending these benefits to the communication network so integral to CPS, multicast and security innovations that consider CPS constraints will be proposed.
This project will provide computational and communication foundations for CPS through the following tasks. (1) An open source hardware design will be created. Abandoning the error-prone paradigm of shared memory communication, Precision Timed (PRET) processors for dataflow computations will be extended. (2) The hardware/software interface will be investigated specifically for PRET architectures. (3) A routing algorithm considering the CPS constraints will be investigated. The constraints include efficiency, adaptability, scalability, simplicity, and security. (4) Distributed Source Coding for CPS applications will be studied with focus on challenges from small packet sizes in these applications.
This project will engage the community and students in multiple grades and institutions, through the following undertakings. (1) A package for education and research in CPS will be assembled. This package and the material from this project in the form of tutorials, publications, and curriculum will be available to other institutions. (2) New courses will be created integrating research results into education. (3) A diverse group of students including women and minorities will be recruited. (4) Two applications will be implemented in the fields of medical devices and emergency response.
Performance Period: 09/01/2009 - 08/31/2013
Institution: University of Tennessee Chattanooga
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 0932113
Abstract
The objective of this research project is to achieve fundamental advances in software technology that will enable building cyber-physical systems to allow citizens to see the environmental and health impacts of their daily activities through a citizen-driven body-worn mobile-phone-based commodity sensing platform. The approach is to create aspect-oriented extensions to a publish-subscribe architecture, called Open Rich Services (ORS), to provide a highly extensible and adaptive infrastructure. As one example, ORS will enable highly adaptive power management that not only adapts to current device conditions, but also the nature of the data, the data's application, and the presence and status of other sensors in the area. In this way, ORS will enable additional research advances in power management, algorithms, security and privacy during the project. A test-bed called CitiSense will be built, enabling in-the-world user and system studies for evaluating the approach and providing a glimpse of a future enhanced by cyber-physical systems.
The research in this proposal will lead to fundamental advances in modularity techniques for composable adaptive systems, adaptive power management, cryptographic methods for open systems, interaction design for the mobile context, and statistical inference under multiple sources of noise.
The scientific and engineering advances achieved through this proposal will advance our national capability to develop cyber-physical systems operating under decentralized control and severe resource constraints. The students trained under this project will become part of a new generation of researchers and practitioners prepared to advance the state of cyber-physical systems for the coming decades.
Performance Period: 09/01/2009 - 08/31/2013
Institution: University of California-San Diego
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 0932403
Abstract
The objective of this research is the development of methods for the control of energy flow in buildings, as enabled by cyber infrastructure. The approach is inherently interdisciplinary, bringing together electrical and mechanical engineers alongside computer scientists to advance the state of the art in simulation, design, specification and control of buildings with multiple forms of energy systems, including generation and storage. A significant novelty of this project lies in a fundamental view of a building as a set of overlapping, interacting networks. These networks include the thermal network of the physical building, the energy distribution network, the sensing and control network, as well as the human network, which in the past have been considered only separately. This work thus seeks to develop methods for simulating, optimizing, modeling, and control of complex, heterogeneous networks, with specific application to energy efficient buildings. The advent of maturing distributed and renewable energy sources for on-site cooling, heating, and power production and the concomitant developments in the areas of cyberphysical and microgrid systems present an enormous opportunity to substantially increase energy efficiency and reduce energy-related emissions in the commercial building energy sector. In addition, there is a direct impact of the proposed work in training students with backgrounds in the unique blend of engineering and computer science that is needed for the study of cyber-enabled energy efficient management of structures, as well as planned interactions at the undergraduate and K-12 level.
Performance Period: 09/01/2009 - 08/31/2012
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 0931748
Project URL
Project URL
Abstract
The objective of this research is to study active sensing and adaptive fusion using vision and acoustic sensors for continuous, reliable fall detection and assessment of fall risk in dynamic and unstructured home environments. The approach is to incorporate active vision with infrared light sources and camera controls, an acoustic array that identifies the sound characteristics and location, and sensor fusion based on the Choquet integral and hierarchical fuzzy logic systems that supports uncertain heterogeneous sensor data at varying time scales, qualitative data, and risk factors.
The project will advance the state of the art in (1) active vision sensing for human activity recognition in dynamic and unpredictable environments, (2) acoustic sensing in unstructured environments, (3) adaptive sensor fusion and decision making using heterogeneous sensor data in dynamic and unpredictable environments, (4) automatic fall detection and fall risk assessment using non-wearable sensors, and (5) algorithms for cyber physical systems that address the interplay of anomaly detection (falls) and risk factors affecting the likelihood of an anomaly event.
The project will impact the health care and quality of life for older adults. New approaches will assist health care providers to identify potential health problems early, offering a model for eldercare technology that keeps seniors independent while reducing health care costs. The project will train the next generation of researchers to handle real, cyber-physical systems. Students will be mentored, and research outcomes will be integrated into the classroom. Novel outreach activities are planned to reach the elderly community and the general public
Performance Period: 09/01/2009 - 08/31/2013
Institution: University of Missouri-Columbia
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 0931607