Smart Cities are complex cyber-physical systems with large human populations adding additional complexity. Instrumentation and modeling are components of a smart city. Regardless, however, of the ubiquity of instrumentation and precision of models, in the end, humans and human teams will make decisions about citywide operations and management, especially in crisis. We contend that the hierarchical nature of contemporary command and control systems can create virtual blind spots in which opportunities or dangers may be invisible to the hierarchy because the necessary information is obscured as it moves between levels of abstraction in the hierarchy. This project will involve teaming with crisis management experts and researchers to develop intelligent agents designed to minimize cognitive load on decision makers, exploit semantic relationships in reports and sensor data to advise of otherwise invisible occurrences, and sequence the actions of ground-level assets to refine causal relationship models to better reflect ongoing developments during crisis and/or event management. This project addresses the following technology gap(s) as it translates from research discovery toward commercial application - a) demonstration of the effectiveness of information presentation and transparency in situations where agents can support and enhance human decision-making without increasing the cognitive workload of the human; b) transfer state-of-the-art foundational research in semantic data and information integration to the complex disaster scenario; c) development of model consistency maintenance tools for automatic update of causal models of various disaster and/or emergency situations. In addition, personnel involved in this project, e.g., graduate students, will receive innovation experiences through the design, development and testing of the model developed. This project will explore transferability of the research results into tools in other application areas such as Pararescuer training, AFRL disaster response system RIPPLE, and Clark County Emergency Management Agency. This project will also have outreach efforts with mentoring high school and undergraduate students at Discovery Lab, Tec^Edge through the Summer at the Edge/Year at the Edge Programs (SATE/YATE).

Three emerging technologies provide unique opportunities for denser cities throughout the developed world: vehicle sharing, electric vehicles, and autonomous systems. Bringing these technologies close together can help enable joint mobility-on-demand and urban-logistics services. This project focuses on the co-development of design and algorithms to enable new concepts that will serve this purpose. The Persuasive Electric Vehicle (PEV) is a tricycle navigating in the bike lanes. The PEV can autonomously drive itself to its next customer; it can also deliver packages to its customers who order goods online. On the algorithmic front, the project will investigate (i) provably-safe algorithms for autonomous navigation in bike lanes, and (ii) algorithms for high-performance routing and rebalancing for joint mobility on demand and urban logistics. On the design front, the project will investigate (i) the vehicle-level designs that can best embrace the relevant CPS technologies, and (ii) the system-level designs and urban planning practices that can help enable the PEV concept. The PIs will collaborate with the City of Boston and participate in the Global City Teams Challenge, where they will demonstrate the PEV concept and its potential impact on future smart cities.

This project exploits an early concept of a flexible, low-cost, and drone-carried broadband long-distance communication infrastructure and investigates its capability for immediate smart-city application in emergency response. This effort is to support the Smart Emergency Response System (SERS) cluster to participate in the Global City Teams Challenge. This project will have an immediate impact in firefighting and other smart-city emergency response applications by quickly deploying a broadband communication infrastructure, thus improving the efficiency of first responders and saving lives. This communication infrastructure expands the capability of individual drones and enables broad new multi-drone applications for smart cities and has the potential to create new businesses and job markets. This interdisciplinary project addresses the following technology issues: 1) development of cyber-physical systems (CPS) technology that enables robust long-range drone-to-drone communication infrastructure; 2) practical drone system design and performance evaluation for WiFi provision; and 3) a systematic investigation of its capability to address smart-city emergency response needs, through both analysis and participation in fire-fighting exercises, as a case study. The project team includes an academic institution, technology companies and government planners, each of whom provides complementary expertise and perspectives that are crucial to the success of the project. The project also provides exciting interdisciplinary training opportunities for students and the community to learn CPS technologies and the Global City Teams Challenge efforts.

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.

The electric power grid, a cyber-physical system (CPS), faces an alarmingly high risk of catastrophic damage from cyber-attacks. However, modeling cyber-attacks, evaluating consequences, and developing appropriate countermeasures require a detailed, realistic, and tractable model of electric power CPS operations. The primary barrier is the lack of access to models for the complex legacy proprietary systems upon which the electric power grid has relied for decades. This project aims to overcome these challenges with the development of an attack-verifying (verifiable) software framework that will capture the electric power system operations in adequate detail. Cyber threats will be verified using this framework through a combination of sound theoretical methods and an open-source commercial simulation engine accessible via a unique transition to practice (TTP) option. This research focuses on four fundamental and related thrusts: (i) identifying classes of cyber-attacks with quantifiable physical consequences and developing detection-based countermeasures; (ii) identifying communication attacks on distributed grid operations and developing information-sharing countermeasures; (iii) developing a verifiable software framework that models the spatio-temporal operations of the electric grid in tandem with thrusts (i) and (ii) to verify attack models, evaluate countermeasures, and develop new resiliency protocols; and (iv) a TTP option, in collaboration with industry-leading experts from IncSys and PowerData, to develop commercial grade open source power simulation software packages to integrate and test the attacks and countermeasures of Thrusts (i) through (iii) as well as develop workforce training curriculum for North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) certification. This research also includes engagement with K-12 students via the Arizona Science Laboratory program.

This project aims to enable cyber-physical systems that can be worn on the body in order to one day allow their users to touch, feel, and manipulate computationally simulated three-dimensional objects or digital data in physically realistic ways, using the whole hand. It will do this by precisely measuring touch and movement-induced displacements of the skin in the hand, and by reproducing these signals interactively, via new technologies to be developed in the project. The resulting systems will offer the potential to impact a wide range of human activities that depend on touch and interaction with the hands. The project seeks to enable new applications for wearable cyber physical interfaces that may have broad applications in health care, manufacturing, consumer electronics, and entertainment. Although human interactive technologies have advanced greatly, current systems employ only a fraction of the sensorimotor capabilities of their users, greatly limiting applications and usability. The development of whole-hand haptic interfaces that allow their wearers to feel and manipulate digital content has been a longstanding goal of engineering research, but has remained far from reality. The reason can be traced to the difficulty of reproducing or even characterizing the complex, action-dependent stimuli that give rise to touch sensations during everyday activities. This project will pioneer new methods for imaging complex haptic stimuli, consisting of movement dependent skin strain and contact-induced surface waves propagating in skin, and for modeling the dependence of these signals on hand kinematics during grasping. It will use the resulting fundamental advances to catalyze the development of novel wearable CPS, in the form of whole-hand haptic interfaces. The latter will employ surface wave and skin strain feedback to supply haptic feedback to the hand during interaction with real and computational objects, enabling a range of new applications in VR. The project will be executed through research in three main research areas. In the first, it will utilize novel contact and non-contact techniques based on data acquired through on-body sensor arrays to measure whole-hand mechanical stimuli and grasping kinematics at high spatial and temporal resolution. In a second research area, it will undertake data-driven systems modeling and analysis of statistical contingencies between the kinematic and cutaneous sensed during everyday activities. In a third research area, it will engineer and perceptually evaluate novel cyber physical systems consisting of haptic interfaces for whole hand interaction. In order to further advance the applications of these systems in medicine, through a collaboration with the Drexel College of Medicine, the project will develop new methods for assessing clinical skills of palpation during medical examination, with the aim of improving the efficacy of what is often the first, most common, and best opportunity for diagnosis, using physician's own sense of touch.

This project represents a cross-disciplinary collaborative research effort on developing rigorous, closed-loop approaches for designing, simulating, and verifying medical devices. The work will open fundamental new approaches for radically accelerating the pace of medical device innovation, especially in the sphere of cardiac-device design. Specific attention will be devoted to developing advanced formal methods-based approaches for analyzing controller designs for safety and effectiveness; and devising methods for expediting regulatory and other third-party reviews of device designs. The project team includes members with research backgrounds in computer science, electrical engineering, biophysics, and cardiology; the PIs will use a coordinated approach that balances theoretical, experimental and practical concerns to yield results that are intended to transform the practice of device design while also facilitating the translation of new cardiac therapies into practice. The proposed effort will lead to significant advances in the state of the art for system verification and cardiac therapies based on the use of formal methods and closed-loop control and verification. The animating vision for the work is to enable the development of a true in silico design methodology for medical devices that can be used to speed the development of new devices and to provide greater assurance that their behaviors match designers' intentions, and to pass regulatory muster more quickly so that they can be used on patients needing their care. The scientific work being proposed will serve this vision by providing mathematically robust techniques for analyzing and verifying the behavior of medical devices, for modeling and simulating heart dynamics, and for conducting closed-loop verification of proposed therapeutic approaches. The acceleration in medical device innovation achievable as a result of the proposed research will also have long-term and sustained societal benefits, as better diagnostic and therapeutic technologies enter into the practice of medicine more quickly. It will also yield a collection of tools and techniques that will be applicable in the design of other types of devices. Finally, it will contribute to the development of human resources and the further inclusion of under-represented groups via its extensive education and outreach programs, including intensive workshop experiences for undergraduates.

Title: CPS: Breakthrough: Compositional Modeling of Cyberphysical Systems This project is devoted to the discovery of new mathematical modeling techniques for Cyber-Physical Systems. In particular, the research involves devising novel conceptual methods for assembling systems from subsystems, and for reasoning about the behavior of systems in terms of the behavior of their subsystems, which may be computational or physical. The results enable scientists and engineers to develop more realistic models of the systems they are designing, and to obtain greater insights into their eventual behavior, without having to build costly prototypes. The intellectual merits are the new notions of system behavior being developed that unify the computational and the physical, and the mathematical operators and laws governing the relationships between systems and subsystems. The project's broader significance and importance lie in the increased pace of innovation within Cyber-Physical System design that the new modeling techniques make possible, and the curricular enhancements that the novel conceptual frameworks under development support. The specific research program of this project involves the development of a novel modeling paradigm, Generalized Synchronization Trees (GSTs), into a rich framework for both describing Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and studying their behavior under interconnection. GSTs are inspired by Milner's use of Synchronization Trees (STs) to model interconnected computing processes, but GSTs generalize the mathematical structure of their forebears in such a way as to encompass systems with discrete ("Cyber") as well as continuous ("Physical") dynamics. As Milner did with STs, the PIs are developing an algebraic theory of composition for GSTs. Such theories have a particular advantage over non-algebraic ones: because the composition of two (or more) objects results in an object of the same type, composition operators can be nested to build large structures out of smaller ones. Thus, the theory of GSTs is inherently compositional. The development of the theory involves five distinct but complementary endeavors. Standard models for cyber-physical systems are being encoded as GSTs in a semantically robust way; meaningful notions of composition and congruence for CPSs are being described and studied algebraically; the interplay between behavioral equivalence and the preservation of system properties is being investigated; a notion of real-time (or clock time) is under consideration for GSTs; and GSTs are being assessed as modeling tools for practical design scenarios.