Applications of CPS technologies essential for the functioning of a society and economy.
In the United States, there is still a great disparity in medical care and most profoundly for emergency care, where limited facilities and remote location play a central role. Based on the Wessels Living History Farm report, the doctor to patient ratio in the United States is 30 to 10,000 in large metropolitan areas, only 5 to 10,000 in most rural areas; and the highest death rates are often found in the most rural counties. For emergency patient care, time to definitive treatment is critical. However, deciding the most effective care for an acute patient requires knowledge and experience. Though medical best practice guidelines exist and are in hospital handbooks, they are often lengthy and difficult to apply clinically. The challenges are exaggerated for doctors in rural areas and emergency medical technicians (EMT) during patient transport. This project's solution to transform emergency care at rural hospitals is to use innovative CPS technologies to help hospitals to improve their adherence to medical best practice. The key to assist medical staff with different levels of experience and skills to adhere to medical best practice is to transform required processes described in medical texts to an executable, adaptive, and distributed medical best practice guidance (EMBG) system. Compared to the computerized sepsis best practice protocol, the EMBG system faces a much bigger challenge as it has to adapt the best practice across rural hospitals, ambulances and center hospitals with different levels of staff expertise and equipment capabilities. Using a Global Positioning System analogy, a GPS leads drivers with different route familiarity to their destination through an optimal route based on the drivers' preferences, the EMBG system leads medical personnel to follow the best medical guideline path to provide emergency care and minimize the time to definitive treatment for acute patients. The project makes the following contributions: 1) The codification of complex medical knowledge is an important advancement in knowledge capture and representation; 2) Pathophysiological model driven communication in high speed ambulance advances life critical communication technology; and 3) Reduced complexity software architectures designed for formal verification bridges the gap between formal method research and system engineering.
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Illinois Institute of Technology
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National Science Foundation
Shangping Ren Submitted by Shangping Ren on April 11th, 2016
Parking can take up a significant amount of the trip costs (time and money) in urban travel. As such, it can considerably influence travelers' choices of modes, locations, and time of travel. The advent of smart sensors, wireless communications, social media and big data analytics offers a unique opportunity to tap parking's influence on travel to make the transportation system more efficient, cleaner, and more resilient. A cyber-physical social system for parking is proposed to realize parking's potential in achieving the above goals. This cyber-physical system consists of smart parking sensors, a parking and traffic data repository, parking management systems, and dynamic traffic flow control. If successful, the results of the investigation will create a new paradigm for managing parking to reduce traffic congestion, emissions and fuel consumption and to enhance system resilience. These results will be disseminated broadly through publications, workshops and seminars. The research will provide interdisciplinary training to both graduate and undergraduate students. The results of this research also fills a void in our graduate transportation curriculum in which parking management gets little coverage. The investigators will organize an online short training course in Coursera and National Highway Institute to bring results to a broader audience. The investigators will also collaborate with Carnegie Museum of Natural History to develop an online digital map and related educational programs, which will be presented in the museum galleries during public events. Technically, new theories, algorithms and systems for efficient management of transportation infrastructure through parking will be developed in this research, leveraging cutting-edge sensing technology, communication technology, big data analytics and feedback control. The research probes massive individualized and infrastructure based traffic and parking data to gain a deeper understanding of travel and parking behavior, and develops a novel reservoir-based network flow model that lays the foundation for modeling the complex interactions between parking and traffic flow in large-scale transportation networks. The theory will be investigated at different levels of granularity to reveal how parking information and pricing mechanisms affect network flow in a competitive market of private and public parking. In addition, this research proposes closed-loop control mechanisms to enhance mobility and sustainability of urban networks. Prices, access and information of publicly owned on-street and off-street parking are dynamically controlled to: a) change day-to-day behavior of all commuters through day-to-day travel experience and/or online information systems; b) change travel behavior of a fraction of adaptive travelers on the fly who are aware of time-of-day parking information and comply to the recommendations; and c) influence the market prices of privately owned parking areas through a competitive parking market.
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Carnegie Mellon University
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National Science Foundation
Submitted by Zhen Qian on April 11th, 2016
Cities provide ready and efficient access to facilities and amenities through shared civil infrastructures such as transportation and healthcare. Making such critical infrastructures resilient to sudden changes, e.g., caused by large-scale disasters, requires careful management of limited and varying resources. The rapidly growing big data from both physical sensors and social media in real-time suggest an unprecedented opportunity for information technology to enable increasing efficiency and effectiveness of adaptive resource management techniques in response to sharp changes in supply and/or demand on critical infrastructures. Within the general areas of resilient infrastructures and big data, this project will focus on the integration of heterogeneous Big Data and real-time analytics that will improve the adaptive management of resources when critical infrastructures are under stress. The integration of heterogeneous data sources is essential because many kinds of physical sensors and social media provide useful information on various critical infrastructures, particularly when they are under stress. This Research Coordination Network (RCN) will promote meetings and activities that stimulate and enable new research on integration of heterogeneous physical sensor data and social media for real-time big data analytics in support of resilient critical infrastructures such as transportation and healthcare in smart cities. As first example, the RCN will support participation from young faculty attending the Early Career Investigators' Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems in Smart Cities (ECI-CPS) at CPSweek (April of each year) and young faculty attending the Workshop on Big Data Analytics for Cyber-physical Systems (BDACPS). As a second example, the RCN will support contributions to a Special Track on Big Data Analytics for Resilient Infrastructures at the IEEE Big Data Congress. As a third example, the RCN will support participation in International meetings organized by other countries, e.g., Japan's Big Data program by Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). The project will also maintain a repository of research resources. Concretely, the RCN will actively collect and make readily available public data sets (e.g., physical and social sensor data) and software tools (e.g., to support real-time big data analytics). The technologies and tools that arise from RCN-enabled research will be applied to socially and economically impactful areas such as reducing congestion and personalized healthcare in smart cities.
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Georgia Institute of Technology
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National Science Foundation
Submitted by Calton Pu on April 11th, 2016
Power systems have seen many changes over the last decade including the increased penetration of renewable generation, electric vehicles and new technologies for sensing, communication and control of a Smart Grid. The most significant impact of these changes are being felt at the consumer level. The ability for consumers and end devices to buy and sell energy and related services in a dynamic and interactive manner is expected to create a transactive energy market as highlighted in the Dec 2014 report of GridWise Alliance. Modeling and preparing the physical system to respond to the somewhat unpredictable behavior of active consumers over a cyber-infrastructure will be critical for maintaining grid reliability. Understanding the impact of such active consumers on the operational and business policies of the distribution utility requires advances in core system science that spans the areas of power engineering, economics, statistical signal processing, game theory, distributed control, multi-agent systems and cyber security. In conjunction with industrial partners, Westar Energy (the largest electric company in Kansas) and Kansas City Power and Light, the PIs plan to develop an architecture that requires little change to the existing investment in power distribution systems while allowing for the dynamic, adaptive control required to integrate active consumers with current and future combinations of high-variability distributed power sources, such as Photo-voltaic (PV) generators and storage batteries. In contrast to prior related efforts that primarily focus on demand response and distributed generation management with a single home/user centric approach, the proposed approach takes a holistic system perspective that includes cumulative modeling of multiple stochastic active consumers and the cyber infrastructure over which they may interact. Specific research thrusts include: (1) a general, extensible, and secure cyber architecture based on holonic multi-agent principles that provides a pathway to the emerging area of transactive energy market in power distribution systems, but also provides foundation for other engineered systems with active consumers; (2) new analytical insights into generalized stochastic modeling of consumer response to real]time price of electricity and the impact of such active consumers on grid reliability and security, and (3) novel methodology for comprehensive distributed control and management of power distribution systems with active consumers and high penetration of distributed renewable resources. Active consumers are an integral part of the Smart City vision where cyber systems are integrated into the transportation, energy, healthcare and biomedical, and critical infrastructure systems. Successful completion of this project will result in modeling, control, analysis and simulation architectures for all such active consumer driven CPS domains. The resulting gains in operating efficiency, economics, reliability and security will result in overall welfare for the society.
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Kansas State University
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National Science Foundation
Anil  Pahwa Submitted by Anil Pahwa on April 11th, 2016
The objective of this research is to design a semi-automated, efficient, and secure emergency response system to reduce the time it takes emergency vehicles to reach their destinations, while increasing the safety of non-emergency vehicles and emergency vehicles alike. Providing route and maneuver guidance to emergency vehicles and non-emergency vehicles will make emergency travel safer and enable police and other first responders to reach and transport those in need, in less time. This should reduce the number of crashes involving emergency vehicles and associated litigation costs while improving medical outcomes, reducing property damage, and instilling greater public confidence in emergency services. At the same time, non-emergency vehicles will also be offered increased safety and, with the reduction of long delays attributed to emergency vehicles, experience reduced incident-related travel time, which will increase productivity and quality of life for drivers. Incorporating connected vehicles into the emergency response system will also provide synergistic opportunities for non-emergency vehicles, including live updates on accident sites, areas to avoid, and information on emergency routes that can be incorporated into navigation software so drivers can avoid potential delays. While the proposed system will naturally advance the quality of transportation in smart cities, it will also provide a platform for future techniques to build upon. For example, the proposed system could be connected with emergency care facilities to balance the load of emergency patients at hospitals, and act as a catalyst toward the realization of a fully-automated emergency response system. New courses and course modules will be developed to recruit and better prepare a future workforce that is well versed in multi-disciplinary collaborations. Video demos and a testbed will be used to showcase the research to the public. The key research component will be the design of an emergency response system that (1) dynamically determines EV routes, (2) coordinates actions by non-emergency vehicles using connected vehicle technology to efficiently and effectively clear paths for emergency vehicles, (3) is able to adapt to uncertain traffic and network conditions, and (4) is difficult to abuse or compromise. The project will result in (1) algorithms that dynamically select EV routes based on uncertain or limited traffic data, (2) emergency protocols that exploit connected vehicle technology to facilitate emergency vehicles maneuvers, (3) an automation module to assist with decision making and maneuvers, and (4) an infrastructure and vehicle hardening framework that prevents cyber abuse. Experiments will be performed on a testbed and a real test track to validate the proposed research.
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Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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National Science Foundation
Submitted by Pamela Murray-Tuite on April 6th, 2016
The goal of this project is to facilitate timely retrieval of dynamic situational awareness information from field-deployed nodes by an operational center in resource-constrained uncertain environments, such as those encountered in disaster recovery or search and rescue missions. This is an important cyber physical system problem with perspectives drawn at a system and platform level, as well as at the system of systems level. Technology advances allow the deployment of field nodes capable of returning rich content (e.g., video/images) that can significantly aid rescue and recovery. However, development of techniques for acquisition, processing and extraction of the content that is relevant to the operation under resource constraints poses significant interdisciplinary challenges, which this project will address. The focus of the project will be on the fundamental science behind these tasks, facilitated by validation via both in house experimentation, and field tests orchestrated based on input from domain experts. In order to realize the vision of this project, a set of algorithms and protocols will be developed to: (a) intelligently activate field sensors and acquire and process the data to extract semantically relevant information; (b) formulate expressive and effective queries that enable the near-real-time retrieval of relevant situational awareness information while adhering to resource constraints; and, (c) impose a network structure that facilitates cost-effective query propagation and response retrieval. The research brings together multiple sub-disciplines in computing sciences including computer vision, data mining, databases and networking, and understanding the scientific principles behind information management with compromised computation/communication resources. The project will have a significant broader impact in the delivery of effective situational awareness in applications like disaster response. The recent :World Disaster Report" states that there were more than 1 million deaths and $1.5 trillion in damage from disasters within the past decade; the research has the potential to drastically reduce these numbers. Other possible applications are law enforcement and environmental monitoring. The project will facilitate a strong inter-disciplinary education program and provide both undergraduate and graduate students experience with experimentation and prototype development. There will be a strong emphasis on engaging the broader community and partnering with programs that target under-represented students and minorities.
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University of California-Irvine
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National Science Foundation
Submitted by Sharad Mehrotra on April 5th, 2016
This research addresses the science of Cyber-Physical Systems. In a multi-agent system, each agent is faced with the task of making decisions taking account of the objectives and actions of other agents, as well as the dynamics of the environment. In such a distributed system each agent receives measurements of its environment, and must infer both the state of the world as well as that of the other agents. The intellectual merits of this research are that it develops new efficient techniques for this information processing, which achieve run-time performance using algorithms that have low computational requirements. The project's broader significance and importance are that it will provide new mathematical and computational tools for use in many engineering applications, including the power grid, transportation networks, and other multi-agent systems, and will be transitioned to practice through professional activities such as workshops, development of educational material for graduates, undergraduates and teenagers, and outreach to industry. The underlying mathematical and computation tools for this research are based on new methods for statistical filtering in a dynamic setting. One of the most important techniques for the design of software control systems constructs state estimates which are sufficient statistics for the associated decision problem. However, conventional approaches to sufficient statistics and state estimation do not apply to the multi-agent setting. Recent results have given new sufficient statistics for this setting, and the research develops the theory and algorithms to allow these statistics to be used for multi-agent control of cyber-physical systems.
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Stanford University
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National Science Foundation
Submitted by Sanjay Lall on April 5th, 2016
During the last decade, we have witnessed a rapid penetration of autonomous systems technology into aerial, road, underwater, and sea vehicles. The autonomy assumed by these vehicles holds the potential to increase performance significantly, for instance, by reducing delays and increasing capacity, while enhancing safety, in a number of transportation systems. However, to exploit the full potential of these autonomy-enabled transportation systems, we must rethink transportation networks and control algorithms that coordinate autonomous vehicles operating on such networks. This project focuses on the design and operation of autonomy-enabled transportation networks that provide provable guarantees on achieving high performance and maintaining safety at all times. The foundational problems arising in this domain involve taking into account the physics governing the vehicles in order to coordinate them using cyber means. This research effort aims to advance the science of cyber-physical systems by following a unique and radical approach, drawing inspiration and techniques from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and self-organizing systems, and blending this inspiration with the foundational tools of queueing theory, control theory, and optimization. This approach may allow orders of magnitude improvement in the servicing capabilities of various transportation networks for moving goods or people. The applications include the automation of warehouses, factory floors, sea ports, aircraft carrier decks, transportation networks involving driverless cars, drone-enabled delivery networks, air traffic management, and military logistics networks. The project also aims to start a new wave of classes and tutorials that will create trained engineers and a research community in the area of safe and efficient transportation networks enabled by autonomous cyber-physical systems.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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National Science Foundation
Submitted by Sertac Karaman on April 5th, 2016
Smart grid includes two interdependent infrastructures: power transmission and distribution network, and the supporting telecommunications network. Complex interactions among these infrastructures lead to new pathways for attack and failure propagation that are currently not well understood. This innovative project takes a holistic multilevel approach to understand and characterize the interdependencies between these two infrastructures, and devise mechanisms to enhance their robustness. Specifically, the project has four goals. The first goal is to understand the standardized smart grid communications protocols in depth and examine mechanisms to harden them. This is essential since the current protocols are notoriously easy to attack. The second goal is to ensure robustness in state estimation techniques since they form the basis for much of the analysis of smart grid. In particular, the project shall exploit a steganography-based approach to detect bad data and compromised devices. The third goal is to explore trust-based attack detection strategies that combine the secure state estimation with power flow models and software attestation to detect and isolate compromised components. The final goal is to study reconfiguration strategies that combine light-weight prediction models, stochastic decision processes, intentional islanding, and game theory techniques to mitigate the spreading of failures and the loss of load. A unique aspect of smart grid security that will be studied in this project is the critical importance of timeliness, and thus a tradeoff between effectiveness of the mechanisms and the overhead introduced. The project is expected to provide practical techniques for making the smart grid more robust against failures and attacks, and enable it to recover from large scale failures with less loss of capacity. The project will also train students in the multidisciplinary areas of power systems operation and design, networking protocols, and cyber-physical security.
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Temple University
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National Science Foundation
Krishna Kant Submitted by Krishna Kant on April 5th, 2016
Event
FTC 2016
Future Technologies Conference 2016 - FTC 2016 6-7 December 2016 | San Francisco, United States | www.SAIConference.com/FTC2016 Sponsored by HPCC Systems FTC attracts researchers, scientists and technologists from some of the top companies, universities, research firms and government agencies from around the world. The conference is predicated on the successful conferences by The Science and Information (SAI) Organization that have been held in the UK since 2013.
Submitted by Anonymous on April 4th, 2016
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