Systems that maintain state awareness and an accepted level of operational normalcy in response to disturbances, including threats of an unexpected and malicious nature.
Announcement
Call for Proposals - Global City Teams Challenge Funding Opportunities

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched the 2016 Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC; see http://www.nist.gov/cps/sagc.cfm) with a kickoff meeting on November 12-13, 2015, in Gaithersburg, MD. This meeting brought together city planners and representatives from technology companies, academic institutions, and non-profits with the aim of fostering teams that will contribute to an overall vision for Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) - effectively integrating networked information systems, sensing and communication devices, data sources, decision-making, and physical infrastructure to transform communities by improving quality of life, environmental health, social well-being, educational achievement, or overall economic growth and stability.

NIST's GCTC builds upon the National Science Foundation's (NSF) longstanding investments in cyber-physical systems (CPS). NSF established the CPS program in 2008 to develop the principles, methodologies, and tools needed to deeply embed computational intelligence, communications, and control, along with new mechanisms for sensing, actuation, and adaptation, into physical systems. The NSF CPS program, which today includes the participation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Transportation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and National Institutes of Health, has funded a strong portfolio of projects that together have pushed the boundaries of fundamental knowledge and systems engineering in core science and technology areas needed to support an ever-growing set of application domains. CPS investments are enabling systems that are central to emerging S&CC infrastructure and services, including in areas such as intelligent transportation systems (ground, aviation, and maritime), building control and automation, advanced manufacturing (including cyber-manufacturing), healthcare and medical devices, and the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT). Dependability, security, privacy, and safety continue to be central priorities for the program in pursuing the vision of a world in which CPS dramatically improve quality of life. Along the way, the CPS program has also nurtured a vibrant CPS research community.

With this Dear Colleague letter (DCL), NSF is announcing its intention to fund EArly-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) proposals to support NSF researchers participating in the NIST GCTC, with the goal of pursuing novel research on the effective integration of networked computing systems and physical devices that will have significant impact in meeting the challenges of Smart and Connected Communities. Researchers must be members of, or be seeking to establish, GCTC teams that build upon the results of previous or active NSF-funded projects, and must provide evidence of active team membership and participation as part of the submission. [Note that, while this DCL is aligned with NSF’s broader efforts in Smart and Connected Communities (see http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf15120), a key requirement for this DCL is active participation in a GCTC team.] Proposals should emphasize the fundamental research inherent to the real-world problems being addressed; the manner in which the proposed solutions will be adopted by one or more local communities; and the potential challenges with respect to both research and deployment. Successful proposals will quantify the magnitude of potential societal impacts; and will result in transformative, long-term benefits rather than incremental advances. Finally, proposals must address why the work is appropriate for EAGER funding (see details below), including what key risks will be mitigated to facilitate future high-reward advances and why the timing of the project will maximize the potential for success.

The deadline for submission of EAGERs is April 1, 2016, but earlier submissions are encouraged, and decisions will be made on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Submission of EAGER proposals will be via Fastlane or Grants.gov. EAGER submissions should follow the NSF's Grant Proposal Guide (GPG) II.D.2 (see http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=gpg). (As noted in the GPG, EAGER is a funding mechanism for supporting exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches. This work may be considered especially "high-risk/high-reward," for example, in the sense that it involves radically different approaches, applies new expertise, or engages novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.)

An investigator may be included in only one submission in response to this DCL; if more than one is submitted, only the first one will be considered.

For further information, please contact the cognizant CPS program directors:

  • David Corman, CISE/CNS/CPS, dcorman@nsf.gov
  • Kishan Baheti, ENG/ECCS/EPCN, rbaheti@nsf.gov
  • Sylvia Spengler, CISE/IIS/CPS, sspengle@nsf.gov
  • Gurdip Singh, CISE/CNS/CSR, gsingh@nsf.gov
General Announcement
Not in Slideshow
Submitted by Anonymous on February 12th, 2016
Event
RV 2016
16th International Conference on Runtime Verification (RV 2016) Scope
Submitted by Anonymous on January 27th, 2016
Event
VVCPS 2016
1st International Workshop on Verification and Validation of Cyber-Physical Systems (V2CPS) co-located with iFM 2016
Submitted by Anonymous on January 22nd, 2016
Event
INDIN 2016
INDIN 2016 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics Sponsored by: IEEE Industrial Electronics Society and Pprime Institute, Futuroscope-Poitiers, France INDIN2016  is 14th International Conference on Industrial Informatics sponsored by the Industrial Electronics Society of the IEEE. The  premier  conference  series  presenting  the  state  of  the  art  and  future  perspectives  of industrial information  technologies.
Submitted by Anonymous on December 23rd, 2015
Project
EAGER: Exploring Resilience in SmartCity Water Infrastructure
Water is a critical resource and a lifeline service to communities worldwide; the generation, treatment, distribution and maintenance of water workflows is typically managed by local governments and water districts. Recent events such as water supply disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the looming California drought crisis clearly indicate society's dependence on critical lifeline services such as water and the far-reaching impacts that its disruption can cause. Over the years, these critical infrastructures have become more complex and often more vulnerable to failures. The ability to view water workflows as a community wide cyber-physical system (CPS) with multiple levels of observation/control and diverse players (suppliers, distributors, consumers) presents new possibilities. Designing robust water systems involves a clear understanding of the structure, components and operation of this CPS system and how community infrastructure dynamics (e.g. varying demands, small/large disruptions) impact lifeline service availabilities and how service level decisions impact infrastructure control. The proposal emphasizes a new approach to exploring engineering systems that will result in substantial advances in the understanding of lifeline systems and approaches to make them adaptive and resilient. Building resilience into urban lifelines raises a number of monumental challenges including identifying the aspects of systems that can be observed/sensed and adapted and to developing general principles that can guide adaptation. The key idea is to develop methodologies to understand operational performance and resilience issues for real-world community water infrastructures and explore solutions to problems in cyberspace before instantiating them into a physical infrastructure. The effort includes: 1) Developing a flexible modeling framework that captures system needs at multiple levels of temporal and spatial abstraction; 2) Developing real-time algorithms supporting resilience; 3) Designing adaptations for water systems using a data-driven approach; and 4) Demonstrating the important broader impact of the research on critical water system infrastructure at the Global City Technology Challenge and the longer term impact on infrastructure for a resilient control framework.
1535680
Off
ImageCat, Inc.
Ronald Eguchi
-
National Science Foundation
Submitted by Ronald Eguchi on December 22nd, 2015
Project
EAGER: Exploring Resilience in SmartCity Water Infrastructure
Water is a critical resource and a lifeline service to communities worldwide; the generation, treatment, distribution and maintenance of water workflows is typically managed by local governments and water districts. Recent events such as water supply disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the looming California drought crisis clearly indicate society's dependence on critical lifeline services such as water and the far-reaching impacts that its disruption can cause. Over the years, these critical infrastructures have become more complex and often more vulnerable to failures. The ability to view water workflows as a community wide cyber-physical system (CPS) with multiple levels of observation/control and diverse players (suppliers, distributors, consumers) presents new possibilities. Designing robust water systems involves a clear understanding of the structure, components and operation of this CPS system and how community infrastructure dynamics (e.g. varying demands, small/large disruptions) impact lifeline service availabilities and how service level decisions impact infrastructure control. The proposal emphasizes a new approach to exploring engineering systems that will result in substantial advances in the understanding of lifeline systems and approaches to make them adaptive and resilient. Building resilience into urban lifelines raises a number of monumental challenges including identifying the aspects of systems that can be observed/sensed and adapted and to developing general principles that can guide adaptation. The key idea is to develop methodologies to understand operational performance and resilience issues for real-world community water infrastructures and explore solutions to problems in cyberspace before instantiating them into a physical infrastructure. The effort includes: 1) Developing a flexible modeling framework that captures system needs at multiple levels of temporal and spatial abstraction; 2) Developing real-time algorithms supporting resilience; 3) Designing adaptations for water systems using a data-driven approach; and 4) Demonstrating the important broader impact of the research on critical water system infrastructure at the Global City Technology Challenge and the longer term impact on infrastructure for a resilient control framework.
1528995
Off
University of California at Irvine
Nalini Venkatasubramanian
-
National Science Foundation
Nalini Venkatasubramanian Submitted by Nalini Venkatasubramanian on December 22nd, 2015
Project
CAREER: Resilient Design of Networked Infrastructure Systems: Models, Validation, and Synthesis
This project advances the scientific knowledge on design methods for improving the resilience of civil infrastructures to disruptions. To improve resilience, critical services in civil infrastructure sectors must utilize new diagnostic tools and control algorithms that ensure survivability in the presence of both security attacks and random faults, and also include the models of incentives of human decision makers in the design process. This project will develop a practical design toolkit and platform to enable the integration of resiliency-improving control tools and incentive schemes for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) deployed in civil infrastructures. Theory and algorithms will be applied to assess resiliency levels, select strategies to improve performance, and provide reliability and security guarantees for sector-specific CPS functionalities in water, electricity distribution and transportation infrastructures. The main focus is on resilient design of network control functionalities to address problems of incident response, demand management, and supply uncertainties. More broadly, the knowledge and tools from this project will influence CPS designs in water, transport, and energy sectors, and also be applicable to other systems such as supply-chains for food, oil and gas. The proposed platform will be used to develop case studies, test implementations, and design projects for supporting education and outreach activities. Current CPS deployments lack integrated components designed to survive in uncertain environments subject to random events and the actions of strategic entities. The toolkit (i) models the propagation of disruptions due to failure of cyber-physical components, (ii) detects and responds to both local and network-level failures, and (iii) designs incentive schemes that improve aggregate levels of public good (e.g., decongestion, security), while accounting for network interdependencies and private information among strategic entities. The validation approach uses real-world data collected from public sources, test cases developed by domain experts, and simulation software. These tools are integrated to provide a multi-layer design platform, which explores the design space to synthesize solutions that meet resiliency specifications. The platform ensures that synthesized implementations meet functionality requirements, and also estimates the performance guarantees necessary for CPS resilience. This modeling, validation, exploration, and synthesis approach provides a scientific basis for resilience engineering. It supports CPS education by providing a platform and structured workflow for future engineers to approach and appreciate implementation realities and socio-technical constraints.
1453126
Off
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Saurabh Amin
-
National Science Foundation
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1624328&HistoricalAwards=false
Saurabh Amin Submitted by Saurabh Amin on December 22nd, 2015
Project
EAGER: SCALE 2 (Safe Community Awareness and Alerting) - Extending a SmartAmerica Challenge Project
SCALE2 explores the design of resilient, inexpensive cyber-physical systems (CPS) technologies to create community-wide smartspaces for public/personal safety. SCALE2 aims to demonstrate that community safety can be realized by augmenting CPS technologies with end-to-end resilience mechanisms. Such a study requires real-world community-scale deployments to understand citizen concerns and can only be achieved through partnerships between various stakeholders - researchers, government agencies, and industry. The SCALE2 multisensory platform will use inexpensive Internet of things (IoT) components, and support dependable operation by enabling resilient information-flow through multiple system layers. Research will explore mechanisms for (a) ingest of real-time data through flexible rich data models, (b) Quality of Service (QoS)-aware messaging to cloud platforms, and (c) reliable detection of higher-level community events through semantics-driven virtual sensing. SCALE2, through its established partnerships/testbeds, offers a unique short-term opportunity to guide future resilience technologies, train the next generation of students and have broader community impact. SCALE2 will be deployed at Montgomery County, MD, and the Irvine-Sensorium working with local agencies.
1450768
Off
University of California-Irvine
Nalini Venkatasubramanian
-
National Science Foundation
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1450768&HistoricalAwards=false
Nalini Venkatasubramanian Submitted by Nalini Venkatasubramanian on December 22nd, 2015
Project
CPS: Breakthrough: Development of Novel Architectures for Control and Diagnosis of Safety-Critical Complex Cyber-Physical Systems
Title: CPS: Breakthrough: Development of Novel Architectures for Control and Diagnosis of Safety-Critical Complex Cyber-Physical Systems This project is developing novel architectures for control and diagnosis of complex cyber-physical systems subject to stringent performance requirements in terms of safety, resilience, and adaptivity. These ever-increasing demands necessitate the use of formal model-based approaches to synthesize provably-correct feedback controllers. The intellectual merit of this research lies in a novel combination of techniques from the fields of dynamical systems, discrete event systems, reactive synthesis, and graph theory, together with new advancements in terms of abstraction techniques, computationally efficient synthesis of control and diagnosis strategies that support distributed implementations, and synthesis of acquisition of information and communication strategies. The project's broader significance and importance are demonstrated by the expected improvement of the safety, resilience, and performance of complex cyber-physical systems in critical infrastructures as well as the efficiency with which they are designed and certified. The original approach being developed is based on the combination of multi-resolution abstraction graphs for building discrete models of the underlying cyber-physical system with reactive synthesis techniques that exploit a representation of the solution space in terms of a finite structure called a decentralized bipartite transition system. The concepts of abstraction graph and decentralized bipartite transition system are novel and open new avenues of investigation with significant potential to the formal synthesis of safe, resilient, and adaptive controllers. This methodology naturally results in a set of decentralized and asynchronous controllers and diagnosers, which ensures greater resilience and adaptivity. Overall, this research will significantly impact the Science of Cyber-Physical Systems and the Engineering of Cyber-Physical Systems.
1446298
Off
University of Michigan Ann Arbor
Stephane Lafortune
-
National Science Foundation
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1446298&HistoricalAwards=false
Stephane Lafortune Submitted by Stephane Lafortune on December 21st, 2015
Project
CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: A Unified System Theoretic Framework for Cyber Attack-Resilient Power Grid
The electric power grid is a complex cyber-physical system, whose reliable and secure operation is of paramount importance to national security and economic vitality. There is a growing and evolving threat of cyber-based attacks, both in numbers and sophistication, on the nation's critical infrastructure. Therefore, cyber security "encompassing attack prevention, detection, mitigation, and resilience" is critical in today's power grid and the emerging smart grid. The goal of this project is to develop a unified system-theoretic framework and analytical tools for cyber-physical security of power systems, capturing the dynamics of the physical system as well as that of the cyber system. Research tasks include: 1) Development of a methodology for impact analysis that includes systematic identification of worst-case stealthy attacks on the power system's wide-area control and evaluating the resulting consequences in terms of stability violations and performance loss. 2) Development of robust cyber-physical countermeasures, employing a combination of methods from system theory, cyber security, and model-based/data-driven tools, in the form of domain-specific anomaly detection/tolerance algorithms and attack-resilient control algorithms. 3) Evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed impact modeling and mitigation algorithms through a combination of simulation and testbed-based evaluations, using realistic system topologies and attack scenarios. The project makes significant contributions to enhance the security and resiliency of the power grid and lays a scientific foundation for cyber-physical security of critical infrastructure. Also, the project develops novel curriculum modules, mentors graduate and undergraduate students including under-represented minorities, leverages industrial collaborations, and exposes high school students to cyber security concepts.
1329915
Off
Iowa State University
Umesh Vaidya
http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~ugvaidya/research.html
-
National Science Foundation
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1329915&HistoricalAwards=false
Submitted by Umesh Vaidya on December 21st, 2015
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