Cyber-physical systems (CPS) may be targeted by multiple simultaneous attacks, with the goal of disrupting availability, safety, and performance of the CPS.  This project aims to develop a passivity-based framework for modeling, composing, and mitigating attacks on CPS, as well as verifying the models and mitigation.  Passivity is an energy dissipation property of dynamical systems that provides basic rules for composition and analysis of interconnected systems.

The 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.

Complex, networked, distributed cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are emerging in many safety-critical application domains such as aerospace and automotive. Design of such systems heavily relies on insights and experiences of engineers as principled design methodologies that can cope with the complexity of these systems are lacking. As a result, extensive testing and fine-tuning is required to ensure that the final product satisfies the design objectives.

This project is developing theoretical foundations and computational algorithms for synthesizing higher-level supervisory and information-acquisition control logic in cyber-physical systems that expend or replenish their resources while interacting with the environment. On the one hand, qualitative requirements capture the safety requirements that are imposed on the system as it operates. On the other hand, quantitative requirements capture resource constraints in the context of energy- aware systems.

This project focuses on designing control mechanisms for a networked system with unknown structure by making use only of non-invasive observations. By non-invasive observations, it is meant that what is being measured is not the system reaction to actively injected inputs, but rather the system behavior when it is operating under standard conditions and subject to potentially unobservable forcing signals.