Title: Efficient Traffic Management: A Formal Methods Approach The objective of this project is to develop a formal methods approach to traffic management. Formal methods is an area of computer science that develops efficient techniques for proving the correct operation of systems, such as computer programs and digital circuits, and for designing systems that are correct by construction. This project extends this formalism to traffic networks where correctness specifications include eliminating congestion, ensuring that the freeway throughput remains over a minimum threshold, that queues are always eventually emptied, etc. The task is then to design signal timing and ramp metering strategies to meet such specifications. To accomplish this task, the project takes advantage of the inherent structure of existing, validated mathematical models of traffic flow and develops computationally efficient design techniques. The results are tested with real traffic data from the Interstate 210 travel corridor in Southern California. The educational component of the project includes course development on modeling and control of traffic networks, featuring in particular the formal methods approach of this project, and organizing workshops to train traffic engineers and operation practitioners on the use of software tools and methodologies of the project. To meet rich control objectives expressed using temporal logic, the project exploits the piecewise affine nature of existing, validated traffic models, and derives efficient finite state abstractions that form the basis of correct-by-construction control synthesis. To ensure scalability, the project further takes advantage of inherent monotonicity properties and decomposibility into sparsely connected subsystems. The first research task is to develop a design framework for signal timing and ramp metering strategies for signalized intersections and freeway traffic control. The second task is the coordinated control of freeway onramps and nearby signalized intersections to address situations such as a freeway demand surge after a sporting event, or an accident on the freeway when signal settings must be adjusted to favor a detour route. The third task is to pursue designs that exploit the statistics of demand for probabilistic correctness guarantees, as well as designs that incorporate optimality requirements, such as minimizing travel time. Validation of the results is pursued with high-fidelity simulation models calibrated using traffic data from the Interstate 210 travel corridor.

Large battery systems with 100s/1000s cells are being used to power various physical platforms. For example, automobiles are transitioning from conventional powertrains to (plug-in) hybrid and electric vehicles (EVs). To achieve the desired efficiency of EVs, significant improvements are needed in the architecture and algorithms of battery management. This project will develop a new comprehensive battery management architecture, called Smart Battery Management System (SBMS). The research is expected to bridge the wide gap existing between cyber-physical system (CPS) research and electrification industry communities, provide environment-friendly solutions, increase the awareness of CPS, and develop skilled human resources. This project will incorporate and enhance a battery management system (BMS) by including battery state-of-charge (SoC) and state-of-health (SoH) algorithms as well as power management strategies on both pack and cell levels. Specifically, it consists of five main research tasks: (i) design a dynamically reconfigurable energy storage system to tolerate harsh internal and external stresses; (ii) develop cell-level thermal management algorithms; (iii) develop efficient, dependable charge and discharge scheduling algorithms in hybrid energy storage systems; (iv) develop a comprehensive, diagnostic/prognostic (P/D) algorithm with system parameters adjusted for making optimal decisions; and (v) build a testbed and evaluate the proposed architecture and algorithms on the testbed. This research will advance the state-of-the-art in the management of large-scale energy storage systems, extending their life and operation-time significantly, which is key to a wide range of battery-powered physical platforms. That is, SBMS will enable batteries to withstand excessive stresses and power physical platforms for a much longer time, all at low costs. SBMS will also serve as a basic framework for various aspects of CPS research, integrating (cyber) dynamic control and P/D mechanisms, and (physical) energy storage system dynamics.

This proposal funds an early-career workshop in Cyber-Physical Systems. The target audience includes late-stage graduate students; postdoctoral fellows; and assistant professors early in their academic careers. The workshop is multidisciplinary, and is designed to focus on foundational CPS ideas applicable across multiple domains such as energy, transportation, and healthcare. The workshop hopes to identify new research directions through brainstorming discussions, plenary talks, and poster sessions. The community of early-career researchers has typically not been addressed by previous CPS workshops or PI meetings; engaging these individuals will foster new partnerships and collaborations, contribute to the growth of new and creative ideas that are foundational to CPS across multiple application domains, and will contribute to the nurturing of early-career PIs and prospective PIs in CPS - thereby positively impacting the CPS innovation ecosystem.

This project provides participant support for the 2014 Transportation CPS Workshop, enabling a broad range of leading researchers spanning academia, industry, and government to develop an ambitious research agenda at the intersection of transportation systems and cyber-physical systems, together with a workshop report that crystallizes this agenda. The workshop addresses an important area of exploration problems of great impact to society: cyber-physical systems in the automotive and aerospace domains, including connected vehicles and their security, safety, and verification, stand to save time, fuel costs, and lives lost to accidents. The project supports community building and ensures multiple and diverse perspectives are included.

This proposal provides for travel of participants of the 2014 CPS Workshop on Medical Frontiers in Research. The workshop is bringing together multi-disciplinary experts from industry, academia, and government to discuss future CPS research challenges in this space. The participants are expert in the foundational science, engineering, and technology underlying next-generation cyber-physical systems, particularly in the context of the application domain of medicine, including medical devices. Through sessions on CPS research in sensing, diagnosis, and prosthetics, the attendees are defining a compelling research agenda in an area of scientific, technical, and engineering exploration that has tremendous societal impact.

This proposal outlines a Workshop for Aspiring PIs in Cyber-Physical Systems. The invitation-only workshop will take place over 1.5 days, and include early-career researchers with interests in cyber-physical systems who have not previously been funded by the NSF CPS solicitation but who have submitted proposals. The workshop will help aspiring PIs understand what NSF (and importantly, the panels convened by NSF) are expecting to see in a successful CPS proposal. The workshop will include exciting talks by CPS program grantees as well as NSF CPS Program Officers, along with panel discussions with researchers as well as program officers. The agenda also plans significant time for discussions between aspiring PIs and panelists. The workshop will enlarge the CPS research community. It will help early-stage researchers better understand CPS program goals, provide opportunities for interaction with program leadership, and result in significant improvement in the quality of CPS project ideas from the community and better alignment with program goals.

Many of the ideas that drive modern cloud computing, such as server virtualization, network slicing, and robust distributed storage, arose from the research community. But because today's clouds have particular, non-malleable implementations of these ideas "baked in," they are unsuitable as facilities in which to conduct research on future cloud architectures. This project creates CloudLab, a facility that will enable fundamental advances in cloud architecture. CloudLab will not be a cloud; CloudLab will be large-scale, distributed scientific infrastructure on top of which many different clouds can be built. It will support thousands of researchers and run hundreds of different, experimental clouds simultaneously. The Phase I CloudLab deployment will provide data centers at Clemson (with Dell equipment), Utah (HP), and Wisconsin (Cisco), with each industrial partner collaborating to explore next-generation ideas for cloud architectures CloudLab will be a place where researchers can try out ideas using any cloud software stack they can imagine. It will accomplish this by running at a layer below cloud infrastructure: it will provide isolated, bare-metal access to a set of resources that researchers can use to bring up their own clouds. These clouds may run instances of today's popular stacks, modest modifications to them, or something entirely new. CloudLab will not be tied to any particular particular cloud stack, and will support experimentation on multiple in parallel. The impact of cloud computing outside the field of computer science has been substantial: it has enabled a new generation of applications and services with direct impacts on society at large. CloudLab is positioned to have an immediate and substantial impact on the research community by providing access to the resources it needs to shape the future of clouds. Cloud architecture research, enabled by CloudLab, will empower a new generation of applications and services which will bring direct benefit to the public in areas of national priority such as medicine, smart grids, and natural disaster early warning and response.

The proposal is to enable students from educational institutions in the United States to attend the CPSWeek 2014 collection of conferences, which are to be held April 14-17, 2014, in Berlin, Germany. CPSWeek is an annual international multi-conference for Cyber-Physical Systems, comprising five major multi-day conferences, five one-day workshops, and four one-day tutorials. It moves from country to country each year. Attending the conference will provide students with a unique opportunity to listen and learn from the keynote speeches, presentations, posters and demos on cutting edge topics on cyber-physical systems, and to network with both leaders and other young researchers in this area. CPS research is expected to have positive societal impacts in many areas, including transportation, energy, agriculture, water/sewage treatment, environmental management and manufacturing systems. These systems must operate safely, dependably, securely, efficiently and respond to events in real time. A key feature of CPS research is the requirement to cooperate across disciplines such as computer science, computer architecture and hardware, material science and sensor design, software engineering, networking, and control engineering. In this inherently interdisciplinary field, where collaborations are essential, meeting other researchers is especially important. This event is especially valuable in this regard, because of the international exposure. There is a very high level of activity and investment in CPS research outside the US including Europe and Asia. For these reasons, strong participation in this event, especially among students (our next generation of researchers) is important to maintaining and advancing CPS research in the US.

This proposal provides travel support for the 2013 Energy CPS workshop, covering speakers, breakout session moderators, and scribes important to the workshop's overall success. Support will also be provided to enable the participation of underrepresented minorities and women, to ensure the discussions will represent important and emerging areas throughout the CPS and energy research communities. The intellectual merit of the proposal is due to the important nature of the workshop -- to define a research agenda for cyber-physical systems in the context of energy. The broader impact is due to the pervasive nature of energy in CPS, and the generation of a long-range research agenda as well as the formulation of new collaborative teams pursuing efforts in this space.

This project will design next-generation defense mechanisms to protect critical infrastructures, such as power grids, large industrial plants, and water distribution systems. These critical infrastructures are complex primarily due to the integration of cyber and physical components, the presence of high-order behaviors and functions, and an intricate and large interconnection pattern. Malicious attackers can exploit the complexity of the infrastructure, and compromise a system's functionality through cyber attacks (that is hacking into the computation and communication systems) and/or physical attacks (tampering with the actuators, sensors and the control system). This work will develop mathematical models of critical infrastructures and attacks, develop intelligent control-theoretic security mechanisms, and validate the findings on an industry-accredited simulation platform. This project will directly impact national security and economic competitiveness, and the results will be available and useful to utility companies. To accompany the scientific advances, the investigators will also engage in educational efforts to bring this research to the classroom at UCR, and will disseminate their results via scientific publications. The work will also create several opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to engage in research at UCR, one of the nation's most ethnically diverse research-intensive institutions. This study encompasses theoretical, computational, and experimental research at UCR aimed at characterizing vulnerabilities of complex cyber-physical systems, with a focus on electric power networks, and control-theoretic defense mechanisms to ensure protection and graceful performance degradation against accidental faults and malicious attacks. This project proposes a transformative approach to cyber-physical security, which builds on a unified control-theoretic framework to model cyber-physical systems, attacks, and defense strategies. This project will undertake three main research initiatives ranging from fundamental scientific and engineering research to analysis using industry-accepted simulation tools: (1) modeling and analysis of cyber-physical attacks, and their impact on system stability and performance; (2) design of monitors to reveal and distinguish between accidental and malignant contingencies; and (3) synthesis of adaptive defense strategies for stochastic and highly dynamic cyber-physical systems. Results will first be characterized from a pure control-theoretic perspective with focus on stochastic, switching, and dynamic cyber-physical systems, so as to highlight fundamental research challenges, and then specialized for the case of smart grid, so as to clarify the implementation of monitors, attacks, and defense strategies. The findings and strategies will be validated for the case of power networks by using the RTDS simulation system, which is an industry-accredited tool for real-time tests of dynamic behavior, faults, attacks, monitoring systems, and defensive strategies.