The purpose of this project is to plan and organize the 2017 NSF Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Principal Investigator (PI) Meeting. This meeting convenes all PIs of the National Science Foundation CPS Program for the fifth time since the program began. The PI Meeting is to take place on November 13-14, 2017 in Alexandria, Virginia. The PI meeting is an annual opportunity for NSF-sponsored CPS researchers, industry representatives, and Federal agencies' representatives to gather and review new CPS developments, identify new and emerging applications, and to discuss technology gaps and barriers. The program agenda is community-driven and includes presentations (oral and poster) from PIs, reports of past year program activities, and showcase/pitch new CPS innovations and results. The annual PI Meeting serves as the only opportunity where the CPS researcher community gathers to share their research, discuss new research opportunities and challenges, and explore new ideas and partnerships for future work. Furthermore, the PI meeting is also an opportunity for the academic research community to interact with industry entities and government agencies with vested interest in CPS research and development. The PI Meeting is a forum for sharing ideas across the CPS community. It has played a major role in growing the community across broad range of sectors and technologies, and performing outreach to others who have interest in learning about the program and participating as future proposers, transition partners, or future sponsors. The 2017 PI meeting will feature additional demonstrations to show the impact of CPS research. Finally, we expect to conduct discussions across the community on considerations and ideas to inspire CPS 2.0, and future collaborations with the Industrial Internet Consortium which includes multiple organizations transitioning CPS research into practice.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are deployed in safety-critical and mission-critical applications for which security is a primary design concern. At the same time, these systems must be designed to be more flexible to changing requirements and environment conditions. This project pursues foundational work on a new methodology for CPS design to enable a "plug-and-play" approach that also ensures the security and safety of the system from the design phase. Such a principled design approach can have an enormous positive impact on the emerging national "smart" infrastructure. Through collaborations with industry partners, the project aims to improve the design process in the CPS industry with a particular focus on automotive systems. Additionally, this project plans to integrate research into undergraduate and graduate coursework, especially capstone projects, and will have an impact on the textbooks and online course content developed by the researchers. This project develops a fundamentally new theory for quantitative contract-based design of CPS that balances security requirements with critical safety and performance concerns. This theory meets a pressing need faced by industrial cyber-physical systems, which are being transformed by a push towards "plug-and-play" design architectures. This push tends to upend the design process for CPS, bringing with it renewed concerns about security and privacy. The proposed approach has the following key components: (i) a precise interface specification for each "plug-in" component in a novel quantitative temporal logic; (ii) rapid, run-time verification methods for checking component conformance to specifications, and (iii) A new approach for mapping components onto existing architectures while satisfying performance and security specifications, and minimizing costs. The approach will be developed and evaluated in an industrial automotive context. The proposed rigorous logic-based formalism, backed by algorithmic advances in verification and synthesis, has the potential to create new fundamental science and help put the industrial trend towards plug-and-play architectures on a firm footing.

Automation is being increasingly introduced into every man-made system. The thrust to achieve trustworthy autonomous systems, which can attain goals independently in the presence of significant uncertainties and for long periods of time without any human intervention, has always been enticing. Significant progress has been made in the avenues of both software and hardware for meeting these objectives. However, technological challenges still exist and particularly in terms of decision making under uncertainty. In an autonomous system, uncertainties can arise from the operating environment, adversarial attacks, and from within the system. While a lot of work has been done on ensuring safety of systems under standard sensing errors, much less attention has been given on securing it and its sensors from attacks. As such, autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS), which rely heavily on sensing units for decision making, remain vulnerable to such attacks. Given the fact that the age of autonomous CPS is upon us and their influence is gradually increasing, it becomes an urgent task to develop effective solutions to ensure the security and trustworthiness of autonomous CPS under adversarial attacks. The researchers of this project provide a comprehensive real-time, resource-aware solution for detection and recovery of autonomous CPS from physical and cyber-attacks. This project also includes effort to educate and prepare the community for the potential cyber and physical threats on autonomous CPS. With the observation that a thorough security certification of autonomous CPS will provide formal evaluation of autonomous CPS, the researchers in this project intend to develop methods to facilitate manufacturers for certifying security solutions. Toward this goal, the researchers will first develop new theories to understand the impact of physical and cyber-attack on system level properties such as controllability, stability, and safety. They will then develop algorithms for detection and recovery of CPS from physical attacks on active sensors. The proposed recovery method will ensure the integrity of sensor measurements when the system is under attack. Furthermore, a new analysis framework will be constructed that uses platform-based design methodology to represent the CPS and verifies it against design metric constraints such as security, timing, resource, and performance. The key contributions of this project towards autonomous CPS security certification include 1) a comprehensive study of relationship between attacks and system-level properties; 2) algorithms and their optimization for detection and automatic recovery of autonomous CPS from attacks; and 3) systematically quantifying impact of security on design metrics.

This CPS Frontiers project addresses highly dynamic Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), understood as systems where a computing delay of a few milliseconds or an incorrectly computed response to a disturbance can lead to catastrophic consequences. Such is the case of cars losing traction when cornering at high speed, unmanned air vehicles performing critical maneuvers such as landing, or disaster and rescue response bipedal robots rushing through the rubble to collect information or save human lives. The preceding examples currently share a common element: the design of their control software is made possible by extensive experience, laborious testing and fine tuning of parameters, and yet, the resulting closed-loop system has no formal guarantees of meeting specifications. The vision of the project is to provide a methodology that allows for complex and dynamic CPSs to meet real-world requirements in an efficient and robust way through the formal synthesis of control software. The research is developing a formal framework for correct-by-construction control software synthesis for highly dynamic CPSs with broad applications to automotive safety systems, prostheses, exoskeletons, aerospace systems, manufacturing, and legged robotics. The design methodology developed here will improve the competitiveness of segments of industry that require a tight integration between hardware and highly advanced control software such as: automotive (dynamic stability and control), aerospace (UAVs), medical (prosthetics, orthotics, and exoskeleton design) and robotics (legged locomotion). To enhance the impact of these efforts, the PIs are developing interdisciplinary teaching materials to be made freely available and disseminating their work to a broad audience. This is a continuing grant of Award # 1562236