Coordinating individual systems to function dynamically and simultaneously in all situations.
Event
Resilience Week 2013
Symposia dedicated to promising research in resilient systems that will protect cyber-physical infrastructures from unexpected and malicious threats--securing our way of life.
Craig Rieger Submitted by Craig Rieger on September 18th, 2012
Event
Cyber-Physical Energy Systems at IEEE Digital Ecosystems 2012
IEEE DEST 2012 (June 18-20 2012, Campione, ITALY) has a track on Cyber Physical Energy Systems:
Submitted by Peter Palensky on April 16th, 2012
Announcement
New Clockwork for Time-Critical Systems Request for Information (RFI)

 

The High Confidence Software and Systems (HCSS) Coordinating Group (CG) of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) subcommittee seeks input from government agencies, researchers, and industry regarding problems, questions, and new directions for research on technology for time-critical systems.

Each new generation of cyber-physical systems (CPS) raises the level of trust that people must put in these systems, while achieving assurances that the systems are worthy of that trust becomes more difficult.  Examples of critical reliance on cyber-physical systems can be seen in defense systems, civil aviation, highways, energy production, advanced manufacturing, and modern healthcare.  These systems make increasingly complex demands for real-time coordination among distributed subsystems.    Even the current generation of large-scale real-time cyber-physical systems may unpredictably miss timing requirements, and expose the whole system to the risk of failure.  Certainly progress on future systems will suffer without a better theory and practice of timed CPS. This calls for "new clockwork".

Advances in distributed clock synchronization technology, such as GPS time and IEEE 1588, present new opportunities and new challenges.  On one hand, widely distributed systems can have a nearly synchronous view of the current time, thereby, enabling better functionality and greater reliability so long as the synchronization mechanism works.  On the other hand, mechanisms for time synchronization do fail.  Natural phenomena and intentionally malicious attacks can disrupt timing in complex systems with catastrophic effects.

Several recent trends have exacerbated time-related problems by increasing reliance on technologies with intrinsic time variability such as wireless communication, multi-core processors, virtualization, and "cloud" computing.  Advances in the science of time-critical systems are needed if we are to be able to exploit the benefits of these technologies with assurance that systems will operate safely and reliably.

Image removed.How can we leverage this technology while mitigating our risks and vulnerabilities?  How do we build systems that benefit from precise global clock synchronization but degrade gracefully if synchronization fails?

The HCSS Coordinating Group envisions a workshop, to be held in early 2013, with the goal of defining a list of needs for research on time-critical aspects of cyber-physical systems, so that future research agendas in CPS can develop robust foundations for reasoning about time on cyber-physical systems across scales, managing resources to meet timeliness requirements, and ensuring service agreements through new tools, techniques and methodologies.  It should address the problems of what kinds of temporal properties need to be met, how to realize solutions in software and hardware, what kinds of mechanisms would be useful, and how they could coexist across distributed hardware/software/network stacks.  The workshop will produce a NITRD publication for the HCSS CG.

We are seeking input from government agencies, researchers, and industry regarding problems, questions, and new directions for research on technology for time-critical systems, please fill out our New Clockwork for Time-Critical Systems Request for Information (RFI) Response.

General Announcement
Not in Slideshow
Chris vanBuskirk Submitted by Chris vanBuskirk on February 24th, 2012
Project
Mathematical Foundations of Open Systems
This workshop on Mathematical Foundations of Open Systems explores new research directions towards a logical/mathematical foundation for modeling the behavior of dynamic open systems that evolve over time through self-organization, regulation, and adaptation to changing environments and structures. Such a framework should provide a unified approach for obtaining an advanced understanding of natural systems, the ability to fix and modify them, and to design cyber-physical systems (CPS) in principled ways using new notions of control and coordination. The workshop, held May 23-25, 2010, Philadelphia, PA, is supported by the NSF and other agency members of the interagency coordinating group on High Confidence Software and Systems.
1037877
Off
University of Pennsylvania
Harvey Rubin
-
National Science Foundation
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1037877&HistoricalAwards=false
Harvey Rubin
Harvey Rubin Submitted by Harvey Rubin on December 6th, 2011
Project
EAGER: Collaborative Research: Seamless Integration of Conjoined Cyber-Physical System Properties
Effective response and adaptation to the physical world, and rigorous management of such behaviors through programmable computational means, are mandatory features of cyber physical systems (CPS). However, achieving such capabilities across diverse application requirements surpasses the current state of the art in system platforms and tools. Current computational platforms and tools often treat physical properties individually and in isolation from other cyber and physical attributes. They do not adequately support the expression, integration, and enforcement of system properties that span cyber and physical domains. This results in inefficient use of both cyber and physical resources, and in lower system effectiveness overall. This work investigates novel approaches to these important problems, based on modularizing and integrating diverse cyber-physical concerns that cross-cut physical, hardware, instruction set, kernel, library, and application abstractions. The three major thrusts of this research are 1) establishing foundational models for expressing, analyzing, enforcing, and measuring different conjoined cyber-physical properties, 2) conducting a fundamental re-examination of system development tools and platforms to identify how different application concerns that cut across them can be modularized as cyber-physical system aspects, and 3) developing prototype demonstrations of our results to evaluate further those advances in the state of the art in aspect-oriented techniques for CPS, to help assess the feasibility of broader application of the approach. The broader impact of this work will be through dissemination of academic papers, and open platforms and tools that afford unprecedented integration of cyber-physical properties.
1060337
Off
Phillip Jones
-
Iowa State University
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1060337&HistoricalAwards=false
Jones, Phillip
Phillip Jones Submitted by Phillip Jones on November 17th, 2011
Project
A Study of Security Countermeasures for Cyber-Physical Systems
This project is developing techniques for secured real-time services for cyber-physical systems. In particular, the research is incorporating real-time traffic modeling techniques into the security service, consequently enhancing both system security and real-time capabilities in an adverse environment. While this proposed methodology has not yet been fully tested, it is potentially transformative. To defend against traffic analysis attacks, the research is developing algorithms that can effectively mask the actual operational modes of cyber-physical applications without compromising the guaranteed quality of service. This is achieved by using the traffic modeling theory, developed by the PIs, to precisely manage the network traffic at the right time and the right place. This traffic modeling theory can also help in develop efficient attack detection and suppression methods that can identify and restrain an attack in real-time. The proposed methods are expected to be more effective, efficient, and scalable than traditional methods.
1059127
Off
Temple University
Wei Zhao
-
National Science Foundation
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1059127&HistoricalAwards=false
Zhao, Wei
Wei Zhao Submitted by Wei Zhao on November 4th, 2011
Project
CPS: Medium: Collaborative Research: Monitoring Human Performance with Wearable Accelerometers
The objective of this research is to develop a cyber-physical system composed of accelerometers and novel machine learning algorithms to analyze data in the context of a set of driving health care applications. The approach is to develop novel machine learning algorithms for temporal segmentation, classification, and detection of subtle elements of human motion. These techniques will allow quantification of human motion and improved full-time monitoring and assessment of medical conditions using a lightweight wearable system. The scientific contribution of this research is in advancing machine learning and human sensing in support of improved medical diagnoses and treatment monitoring by (i) modeling human activity and symptoms through sensor data analysis, (ii) integrating and fusing information from several accelerometers to monitor in real-time, (iii) validating the efficacy of the automated detection through assessments applying the state of the art in diagnostic evaluation, (iv) developing novel machine learning methods for temporal segmentation, classification, and discovery of multiple temporal patterns that discriminate between temporal signals, and (v) providing quality measures to characterize subtle human motion. These algorithms will advance machine learning in the area of unsupervised and semisupervised learning. The driving applications for this research are job coaching for people with cognitive disabilities, tele-rehabilitation for knee osteo-arthritis, assessing variability in balance and gait as an indicator of health of older adults, and measures for assessing Parkinson's patients. This research is highly interdisciplinary and will train graduate students for careers in developing technological innovations in health and monitoring systems.
0931999
Off
Carnegie Mellon University
Jessica Hodgins
-
National Science Foundation
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0931999&HistoricalAwards=false
Hodgins, Jessica
Jessica Hodgins Submitted by Jessica Hodgins on November 3rd, 2011
Project
CPS: Small: Real-time, Simulation-based Planning and Asynchronous Coordination for Cyber-Physical Systems
The objective of this research is to investigate how to replace human decision-making with computational intelligence at a scale not possible before and in applications such as manufacturing, transportation, power-systems and bio-sensors. The approach is to build upon recent contributions in algorithmic motion planning, sensor networks and other fields so as to identify general solutions for planning and coordination in networks of cyber-physical systems. The intellectual merit of the project lies in defining a planning framework, which integrates simulation to utilize its predictive capabilities, and focuses on safety issues in real-time planning problems. The framework is extended to asynchronous coordination by utilizing distributed constraint optimization protocols and dealing with inconsistent state estimates among networked agents. Thus, the project addresses the frequent lack of well-behaved mathematical models for complex systems, the challenges of dynamic and partially-observable environments, and the difficulties in synchronizing and maintaining a unified, global world state estimate for multiple devices over a large-scale network. The broader impact involves the development and dissemination of new algorithms and open-source software. Research outcomes will be integrated to teaching efforts and undergraduate students will be involved in research. Underrepresented groups will be encouraged to participate, along with students from the Davidson Academy of Nevada, a free public high school for gifted students. At a societal level, this project will contribute towards achieving flexible manufacturing floors, automating the transportation infrastructure, autonomously delivering drugs to patients and mitigating cascading failures of the power network. Collaboration with domain experts will assist in realizing this impact.
0932423
Off
University of Nevada
Kostas Bekris
http://www.cse.unr.edu/robotics/pracsys/nsf_cps_small
https://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop?_nfpb=true&_wi…
-
National Science Foundation
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0932423&HistoricalAwards=false
Bekris, Kostas
Kostas Bekris Submitted by Kostas Bekris on October 31st, 2011
Project
EAGER: Collaborative Research: Seamless Integration of Conjoined Cyber-Physical System Properties
Effective response and adaptation to the physical world, and rigorous management of such behaviors through programmable computational means, are mandatory features of cyber physical systems (CPS). However, achieving such capabilities across diverse application requirements surpasses the current state of the art in system platforms and tools. Current computational platforms and tools often treat physical properties individually and in isolation from other cyber and physical attributes. They do not adequately support the expression, integration, and enforcement of system properties that span cyber and physical domains. This results in inefficient use of both cyber and physical resources, and in lower system effectiveness overall. This work investigates novel approaches to these important problems, based on modularizing and integrating diverse cyber-physical concerns that cross-cut physical, hardware, instruction set, kernel, library, and application abstractions. The three major thrusts of this research are 1) establishing foundational models for expressing, analyzing, enforcing, and measuring different conjoined cyber-physical properties, 2) conducting a fundamental re-examination of system development tools and platforms to identify how different application concerns that cut across them can be modularized as cyber-physical system aspects, and 3) developing prototype demonstrations of our results to evaluate further those advances in the state of the art in aspect-oriented techniques for CPS, to help assess the feasibility of broader application of the approach. The broader impact of this work will be through dissemination of academic papers, and open platforms and tools that afford unprecedented integration of cyber-physical properties.
1060093
Off
Washington University
Ron Cytron
-
National Science Foundation
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1060093&HistoricalAwards=false
Cytron, Ron
Ron Cytron Submitted by Ron Cytron on October 31st, 2011
Project
EAGER: A Study of Security Countermeasures for Cyber-Physical Systems
This project is developing techniques for secured real-time services for cyber-physical systems. In particular, the research is incorporating real-time traffic modeling techniques into the security service, consequently enhancing both system security and real-time capabilities in an adverse environment. While this proposed methodology has not yet been fully tested, it is potentially transformative. To defend against traffic analysis attacks, the research is developing algorithms that can effectively mask the actual operational modes of cyber-physical applications without compromising the guaranteed quality of service. This is achieved by using the traffic modeling theory, developed by the PIs, to precisely manage the network traffic at the right time and the right place. This traffic modeling theory can also help in develop efficient attack detection and suppression methods that can identify and restrain an attack in real-time. The proposed methods are expected to be more effective, efficient, and scale-able than traditional methods.
1059116
Off
Texas Southern University
Yuhong Zhang
-
National Science Foundation
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1059116&HistoricalAwards=false
Zhang, Yuhong
Yuhong Zhang Submitted by Yuhong Zhang on April 7th, 2011
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