The goal of this project is to investigate how self-driving, electric vehicles transporting passengers on demand (a system referred to as autonomous mobility-on-demand, or AMoD) can enable optimized, coupled control of the power and transportation networks. The key observation is that the AMoD technology will give rise to complex couplings between the power and transportation networks, namely couplings between charging demand and electricity prices as people move around a city. The hypothesis is that by exploiting such couplings through control and optimization, AMoD systems will lead to lower electricity generation costs and higher integration levels of intermittent renewable energy resources such as wind and solar, while providing more convenient transportation. The results of this project will provide guidelines to transportation stakeholders and policy-makers regarding the deployment of autonomous vehicles on a societal scale, benefitting the U.S. economy by fostering clean and efficient future transportation systems. This project will devise theoretical models and optimization tools for the characterization of the aforementioned couplings and for the system-level control of AMoD with the power network in the loop. The key technical idea is to cast the coupled power and transportation networks in the formal framework of flow optimization, whereby city districts, charging stations, and roads are abstracted as nodes and edges of a graph, and the movements of customers, vehicles, and energy are abstracted as flows over such a graph. This project will then devise a control framework to optimize over the decision variables, e.g., vehicles' routes, charging decisions, and power generation schedules.

Each year the nation spends over $400 billion to power, heat and cool its buildings. Moreover, buildings are a major source of environmental emissions. As a result, even a modest improvement in energy efficiency of the nation's building stock would result in substantial economic and environmental benefits. In this project, the focus is on improving energy efficiency in commercial buildings because this sector represents a substantial portion of the energy usage and costs within the overall building sector. Enhancing the energy efficiency of commercial buildings is a challenging problem, due to the fact that centralized building systems -- such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), or lighting -- must be synthesized and integrated with individual inhabitant behavior and energy consumption patterns. This project aims to design, analyze, and test a cyber-physical and human-in-the-loop enabled control system that can drive sustained energy savings in commercial buildings. It brings together expertise in computational building science, eco-feedback, network theory, data science, and control systems to integrate physical building information and inhabitants with cyber (building-human) interaction models to enable intelligent control of commercial building systems. Specifically, this project will: 1) design an integrated cyber-physical system (CPS), called Building Information, Inhabitant, Interaction, Intelligent Integrated Modeling (BI5M), aimed at reducing energy usage in buildings; 2) assess the complex inter-relationships between and across physical building and inhabitant models, cyber building-human interaction and intelligent control models related to energy conservation behavior; and 3) empirically test and validate modules and the overall BI5M system at test-bed buildings on Stanford's campus and Google's office park. This research incorporates measurement (geospatial building data, energy use data), dynamics (inhabitant social networks), and control (enhanced user control of: plug-load devices, HVAC, lighting) into the BI5M system. The BI5M system is centered on a cyber Building Information Management (BIM) model of the building, and will encompass rigorous systems engineering that will explore relationships across the cyber-physical domains and develop new insights for how the scientific principles of cyber-physical systems can be used to influence the energy efficiency of commercial buildings through both occupant behavior and intelligent control. By integrating physical building information and inhabitants with cyber interaction modeling, the research aims to introduce an integrated human-in-the-loop control paradigm for commercial buildings. In addition to a testbed and validated CPS system for commercial buildings (BI5M), this project targets fundamental knowledge on: ontological components required to integrate dynamic data streams and control information into static building models; complex socio-spatial structures of inhabitants; insights into how building-human and human-human interactions impact inhabitant consumption behavior; and new control models that leverage input on the energy usage, spatial, social and behavior dynamics of inhabitants. The educational impacts of this project will extend to participants (students, faculty, Google employees in the test-bed buildings), as well as a broader student population through the integration of key insights from this work into courses/projects at all three collaborating universities (Stanford, Georgia Tech, and Columbia). The project team will also disseminate results to practitioners/policy-makers working in the building management space through an Outreach Workshop. Additionally, this project will broaden participation in computing fields through a diverse team and by partnering with the Girls Who Code nonprofit to integrate project data sets and tools into their activities.

Each year the nation spends over $400 billion to power, heat and cool its buildings. Moreover, buildings are a major source of environmental emissions. As a result, even a modest improvement in energy efficiency of the nation's building stock would result in substantial economic and environmental benefits. In this project, the focus is on improving energy efficiency in commercial buildings because this sector represents a substantial portion of the energy usage and costs within the overall building sector. Enhancing the energy efficiency of commercial buildings is a challenging problem, due to the fact that centralized building systems -- such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), or lighting -- must be synthesized and integrated with individual inhabitant behavior and energy consumption patterns. This project aims to design, analyze, and test a cyber-physical and human-in-the-loop enabled control system that can drive sustained energy savings in commercial buildings. It brings together expertise in computational building science, eco-feedback, network theory, data science, and control systems to integrate physical building information and inhabitants with cyber (building-human) interaction models to enable intelligent control of commercial building systems. Specifically, this project will: 1) design an integrated cyber-physical system (CPS), called Building Information, Inhabitant, Interaction, Intelligent Integrated Modeling (BI5M), aimed at reducing energy usage in buildings; 2) assess the complex inter-relationships between and across physical building and inhabitant models, cyber building-human interaction and intelligent control models related to energy conservation behavior; and 3) empirically test and validate modules and the overall BI5M system at test-bed buildings on Stanford's campus and Google's office park.

This research incorporates measurement (geospatial building data, energy use data), dynamics (inhabitant social networks), and control (enhanced user control of: plug-load devices, HVAC, lighting) into the BI5M system. The BI5M system is centered on a cyber Building Information Management (BIM) model of the building, and will encompass rigorous systems engineering that will explore relationships across the cyber-physical domains and develop new insights for how the scientific principles of cyber-physical systems can be used to influence the energy efficiency of commercial buildings through both occupant behavior and intelligent control. By integrating physical building information and inhabitants with cyber interaction modeling, the research aims to introduce an integrated human-in-the-loop control paradigm for commercial buildings. In addition to a testbed and validated CPS system for commercial buildings (BI5M), this project targets fundamental knowledge on: ontological components required to integrate dynamic data streams and control information into static building models; complex socio-spatial structures of inhabitants; insights into how building-human and human-human interactions impact inhabitant consumption behavior; and new control models that leverage input on the energy usage, spatial, social and behavior dynamics of inhabitants. The educational impacts of this project will extend to participants (students, faculty, Google employees in the test-bed buildings), as well as a broader student population through the integration of key insights from this work into courses/projects at all three collaborating universities (Stanford, Georgia Tech, and Columbia). The project team will also disseminate results to practitioners/policy-makers working in the building management space through an Outreach Workshop. Additionally, this project will broaden participation in computing fields through a diverse team and by partnering with the Girls Who Code nonprofit to integrate project data sets and tools into their activities.

Cyber-physical system (CPS) technologies, such as automated aircraft and cars, have become sufficiently complex that CPS software verification is now a major bottleneck in product development. This project examines new approaches for auto-generating reduced models of CPS software, in order to incorporate those models in analysis, for instance, in system-wide simulations or bug detection. This project will allow CPS software to be adapted and analyzed much more flexibility in comparison with state-of-the-art methods, which limit software developers by prohibiting use of many modern programming constructs and by penalizing iterative software improvements during the design process. The project's intellectual merit is the introduction of a theory of software-state observability, which will have wide utility for CPS analysis including in applications such as online bug detection. To this end the project concentrates on three specific aims: (i) the development of concepts for reduced-order software modeling based on static and dynamic analyses of CPS software programs, (ii) the formulation of a theory of software-state observability to enable state estimation across the boundaries of physical and software components, and (iii) the application of these theories to online bug monitoring for an open-source flight control system. The project represents a fundamental departure from the conventional treatment of software in a CPS, where software must be tightly specified in advance, where the program must be carefully verified to prove that it meets specifications, and where after final validation the software is assumed to be essentially free of bugs. Our approach permits developers much greater latitude in creating new CPS software by requiring reasonable but not excessive initial testing, as justified by better analysis tools and by online reliability monitoring. The result will enable more sophisticated and lower cost automated cars and unmanned aircraft. Results related to the project will be shared through archival publications and data will be made available online through Tufts University at https://tufts.box.com/s/aq305785bg2s3j29lls8u4wdpybzpcth. Software uploaded to this repository will be available under suitable licensing models (such as BSD or Apache). Data will be retained at least through the duration of this project.

Internet technology, originally developed to convey information, is increasingly being used to control and operate physical devices in homes, factories, medical facilities, and transportation systems, to name just a few application domains. In these more physically-grounded applications, the consequences of misbehavior of a system can be dire, involving not just loss or leakage of information, but loss of life. Historically, computers used in safety-critical systems have been completely isolated from the Internet to protect them from malicious hackers and unpredictable demands for their resources. But the benefits that Internet connectivity offers are irresistible, enabling far more sophisticated services. This project is developing a suite of mathematically-grounded design patterns and open-source software that leverages Internet technology while guaranteeing safety, reliability, and resilience to malicious attacks. One of these patterns endows a networked system with a stronger coordinated notion of time to ensure consistent behavior of the system even in face of unpredictable and uncontrollable delays in the network. Another of these patterns leverages edge computing, placement of computing services near the devices that use them, in hospitals, onboard in cars and trains, and in factories, for example, to mitigate the risks of relying on remote cloud-based services. Edge computers can ensure continuous safe operation even in face of Internet infrastructure collapse, as has occasionally happened under malicious attack. Technical Description: The Internet of Things (IoT) leverages Internet technology in cyber-physical systems, but the protocols and principles of the Internet were not designed for interacting with the physical world. For example, timeliness is not a factor in any widespread Internet technology, with Quality-of-Service (QoS) features having been routinely omitted for decades. Nevertheless, properties of the Internet could prove valuable in CPS, including a global namespace, reliable (eventual) delivery of messages, end-to-end security through asymmetric encryption, certificate-based authentication, and the ability to aggregate data from a multiplicity of sources in cloud-based warehouses. This proposal leverages recent developments that hold promise to bridge the gap, enabling the use of Internet technologies even in safety-critical, timing-sensitive applications such as factory automation and transportation. Specifically, we leverage time-sensitive network (TSN) technology; the use of smart gateways to isolate safety-critical services from best-effort services and to provide local proxies for cloud-based services; locally centralized, globally distributed authentication and authorization; and the development of coherent time-based semantics for distributed real-time services. The focus of this project will be on sound concurrent models of computation, on type-theoretic methods for ensuring correct composition, and on the realization of these formalisms in a software architecture that reconciles widely-used mechanisms in Internet services to hide uncontrollable latencies with the need for repeatable, testable, and robust real-time services in safety-critical systems. An open-source reference implementation will be delivered together with analytical papers on the formal properties of the models.

This project aims to develop innovative design automation methodologies and algorithms for software synthesis of cyber-physical systems (CPS), which have applications in key sectors such as automotive, aerospace, healthcare, and industrial automation. Software has become critical and drives future innovations for many such systems, but faces significant challenges in its development, in particular regarding the formulation, exploration and validation of timing constraints. The results from this project will address critical timing challenges in CPS software development, and lead to correct, predictable and efficient software implementations. In addition to disseminating the results through publications and workshops, the PI will collaborate with industry partners on transitioning the research findings into practice. Leveraging the research activities, the PI will develop an integrated education program that focuses on the interdisciplinary education of K-12, undergraduate and graduate students, through Lego Mindstorms labs development and contest organization, new CPS course development, and textbook writing. The project will develop, a software synthesis framework that addresses the timing challenges in CPS by quantitatively exploring timing constraints for multiple conflicting design metrics and across multiple abstraction layers, and using these timing constraints to drive the design space exploration. Developing the framework includes three closely-related research themes: (1) formulating and exploring timing contracts to co-design functionality and software architecture with respect to various design metrics (e.g., performance, security, schedulability) and to carry out hierarchical refinement across abstraction layers, (2) exploring the generation of software tasks from functional models and the mapping of those tasks onto hardware platforms with holistic timing consideration throughout the synthesis process, and (3) co-simulating functional and architectural models with explicit representation and evaluation of timing contracts to complement the proposed analytical synthesis algorithms.

U.S. economic growth, energy security, and environmental stewardship depend on a sustainable energy policy that promotes conservation,efficiency, and electrification across all major sectors. Buildings are the largest sector and therefore an attractive target of these efforts: current Federal sustainability goals mandate that 50% of U.S.commercial buildings become net-zero energy by 2050. A range of options exists to achieve this goal, but financial concerns require a data-driven, empirically-validated approach. However, critical gaps exist in the energy and water measurement technology, and indoorclimate control science, needed to benchmark competing options, prioritize efficiency investments, and ensure occupant comfort. To address these challenges, this project proposes a new kind of "peel-and-stick" sensor that can be affixed to everyday objects to infer their contributions to whole-building resource consumption. To use the sensors, occupants or building managers simply tag end loads like a ceiling light, shower head, or range top. The sensors monitor the ambient conditions around a load and, using statistical methods,correlate those conditions with readings from existing electricity, gas, or water meters, providing individual estimates without intrusive metering. The sensors are built from integrated circuit technology laminated into smart labels, so they are small, inexpensive, and easy-to-deploy. The sensors are powered by the same ambient signals they sense, eliminating the need for periodic battery replacement or wall power. Collectively, these properties address cost and coverage challenges, and enable scalable deployment and widespread adoption. The intellectual merit of this proposal stems from the insight that the transfer and use of energy (and other resources) usually emits energy, often in a different domain, and that this emitted energy is often enough to intermittently power simple, energy-harvesting sensors whose duty cycle is proportional to the energy being transferred or used. Hence, the mere activation rate of the sensors signalsthe underlying energy use. The power-proportional relationship between usage activity and side channel harvesting, when coupled with state-of-the art, millimeter-scale, nano-power chips and whole-house or panel-level meters, enables small and inexpensive sensor tags that are pervasively distributed with unbounded lifetimes. But, networking and tasking them, and making sense of their data, requires a fundamental rethinking of low-power communications, control, and data fusion to abstract the intermittent, unreliable, and noisy sensor infrastructure into actionable information. This project's broader impact stems from an integrated program of education, research, and outreach that (i) creates a smart objects focused curriculum whose classroom projects are motivated by research needs, (ii) provides research experiences for undergraduates and underrepresented minorities, (iii) mentors students on all aspects of successful research from articulating hypotheses to peer-reviewing papers,(iv) disseminates teaching materials on embedded systems and research pedagogy, (v) produces students who bridge disciplines,operating at the intersection of measurement science, information technology, and sustainability policy, and (vi) translates scientific discovery and technical knowledge into beneficial commercial products through industry outreach and internships, and (vii) engages with the National Labs to ensure that the research addresses pressing problems.

One of the challenges toward achieving the vision of smart cities is improving the state of the underground infrastructure. For example, large US cities have thousands of miles of aging water mains, resulting in hundreds of breaks every year, and a large percentage of water consumption that is unaccounted for. The goal of this project is to develop models and methods to generate, analyze, and share data on underground infrastructure systems, such as water, gas, electricity , and sewer networks. The interdisciplinary team of investigators from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Brown University, and Northwestern University will leverage partnerships with the cities of Chicago and Evanston, Illinois, to make the approach and findings relevant to their stakeholders. Research results will be incorporated in courses at the three institutions. Outreach efforts include events for K-12 students to develop awareness about underground infrastructure from a data and computational perspective. The results of the project will ultimately help municipalities maintain and renovate civil infrastructure in a more effective manner. Cities are cyber-physical systems on a grand scale, and developing a precise knowledge of their infrastructure is critical to building a foundation for the future smart city. This proposal takes an information centric approach based on the complex interaction among thematic data layers to developing, visualizing, querying, analyzing, and providing access to a comprehensive representation of the urban underground infrastructure starting from incomplete and imprecise data. Specifically, the project has the following main technical components: (1) Generation of accurate GIS-based representations of underground infrastructure systems from paper maps, CAD drawings, and other legacy data sources; (2) Visualization of multi-layer networks combining schematic overview diagrams with detailed geometric representations; (3) Query processing algorithms for integrating spatial, temporal, and network data about underground infrastructure systems; (4) Data analytics spanning heterogeneous geospatial data sources and incorporating uncertainty and constraints; (5) Selective access to stakeholders on a need-to-know basis and facilitating data sharing; and (6) Evaluation in collaboration with the cities of Chicago and Evanston.

The rapid evolution of data-driven analytics, Internet of things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS) are fueling a growing set of Smart and Connected Communities (SCC) applications, including for smart transportation and smart energy. However, the deployment of such technological solutions without proper security mechanisms makes them susceptible to data integrity and privacy attacks, as observed in a large number of recent incidents. If not addressed properly, such attacks will not only cripple SCC operations but also influence the extent to which customers are willing to share data. This in turn will make trustworthiness in SCC applications very challenging. To address this, a synergistic team of researchers from the US and Japan, under the JUNO2 program, will collaborate on this project, called STEAM (Secure and Trustworthy framework for integrated Energy and Mobility) to develop a framework to ensure data privacy, data integrity, and trustworthiness in smart and connected communities. The collaboration provides the project with a significant amount of automotive (transportation) data from Japan, and also access to a testbed in Japan. Although the target applications are smart mobility and smart energy (the choice is deliberate to exploit the complementary strengths of Japan and US in these two domains), the proposed techniques and solutions have wide applicability to other domains, such as smart healthcare. The novelty of the STEAM project lies in its integrated approach to handling security and trustworthiness in SCC applications. Specifically, the research team will develop innovative privacy-preserving algorithms and models for anomaly detection, trust and reputation scoring used by application providers for data integrity and information assurance. Towards that goal, they will study trade-offs between security, privacy, trust levels, resources, and performance using two exemplar applications in smart mobility and smart energy exchange in communities. Finally, they will design a modular, secure and trustworthy middleware architecture that implements privacy-preserving algorithms, resource constraints, and trustworthiness of data sources or content and decision-making schemes. The project has access to smart meter data from Texas, California, and Ireland and a large volume of automobile data from Japan. The evaluation plan includes integration of the project's anomaly detection and trustworthy decision-making algorithms into a smart vehicle route planning application and a transactive energy system in a plug-in electric vehicle testbed in Japan.

Automation is being increasingly introduced into every man-made system. The thrust to achieve trustworthy autonomous systems, which can attain goals independently in the presence of significant uncertainties and for long periods of time without any human intervention, has always been enticing. Significant progress has been made in the avenues of both software and hardware for meeting these objectives. However, technological challenges still exist and particularly in terms of decision making under uncertainty. In an autonomous system, uncertainties can arise from the operating environment, adversarial attacks, and from within the system. While a lot of work has been done on ensuring safety of systems under standard sensing errors, much less attention has been given on securing it and its sensors from attacks. As such, autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS), which rely heavily on sensing units for decision making, remain vulnerable to such attacks. Given the fact that the age of autonomous CPS is upon us and their influence is gradually increasing, it becomes an urgent task to develop effective solutions to ensure the security and trustworthiness of autonomous CPS under adversarial attacks. The researchers of this project provide a comprehensive real-time, resource-aware solution for detection and recovery of autonomous CPS from physical and cyber-attacks. This project also includes effort to educate and prepare the community for the potential cyber and physical threats on autonomous CPS. With the observation that a thorough security certification of autonomous CPS will provide formal evaluation of autonomous CPS, the researchers in this project intend to develop methods to facilitate manufacturers for certifying security solutions. Toward this goal, the researchers will first develop new theories to understand the impact of physical and cyber-attack on system level properties such as controllability, stability, and safety. They will then develop algorithms for detection and recovery of CPS from physical attacks on active sensors. The proposed recovery method will ensure the integrity of sensor measurements when the system is under attack. Furthermore, a new analysis framework will be constructed that uses platform-based design methodology to represent the CPS and verifies it against design metric constraints such as security, timing, resource, and performance. The key contributions of this project towards autonomous CPS security certification include 1) a comprehensive study of relationship between attacks and system-level properties; 2) algorithms and their optimization for detection and automatic recovery of autonomous CPS from attacks; and 3) systematically quantifying impact of security on design metrics.