The CrAVES project seeks to lay down intellectual foundations for credible autocoding of embedded systems, by which graphical control system specifications that satisfy given open-loop and closed-loop properties are automatically transformed into source code guaranteed to satisfy the same properties. The goal is that the correctness of these codes can be easily and independently verified by dedicated proof checking systems. During the autocoding process, the properties of control system specifications are transformed into proven assertions explicitly written in the resulting source code. Thus CrAVES aims at transforming the extensive safety and reliability analyses conducted by control system engineers, such as those based on Lyapunov theory, into rigorous, embedded analyses of the corresponding software implementations. CrAVES comes as a useful complement to current static software analysis methods, which it leverages to develop independent verification systems. Computers and computer programs used to manage documents and spreadsheets. They now also interact with physical artifacts (airplanes, power plants, automobile brakes and robotic surgeons), to create Cyber-Physical Systems. Software means complexity and bugs - bugs which can cause real tragedy, far beyond the frozen screens we associate with system crashes on our current PCs. Software autocoding is becoming the de facto recommended practice for many safety-critical applications. CrAVES aims to evolve this towards higher standards of quality and reduced design times and costs. Rigorous, mathematical arguments supporting safety-critical functionalities are the cornerstone of CrAVES. Collaborative programs involving high-school teachers will encourage the transmission of this message to STEM education in high-schools through university programs designed for that purpose.

The focus of this project is the efficient implementation of multiple control and non-control automotive applications in a distributed embedded system (DES) with a goal of developing safe, dependable, and secure Automotive CPS. DES are highly attractive due to the fact that they radically enhance the capabilities of the underlying system by linking a range of devices and sensors and allowing information to be processed in unprecedented ways. Deploying control and non-control applications on a modern DES, which uses advanced processor and communication technology, introduces a host of challenges in their analysis and synthesis, and leads to a large semantic gap between models and their implementation. This gap will be filled via the development of a novel CPS architecture by stitching together common fundamental principles of multimodality from real-time systems and related notions of switching in control theory and integrating them into a co-design of real-time platforms and adaptive controllers. This architecture will be validated at the Toyota Technical Center in the context of engine control and diagnostics. The results of this project will provide the science and technology for a foundation in any and all infrastructure systems ranging from finance and energy to telecommunication and transportation where distributed embedded systems are present. In addition to training the graduate and undergraduate students, and mentoring a post-doctoral associate who will gain multi-domain expertise in advanced control, real-time computation and communication, and performance analysis, an inter-school graduate and an integrated summer course will be developed on control in embedded systems and combined with on-going outreach programs at MIT and UPenn for minority and women undergraduate students and K-12 students.

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.

The objective of this research is to develop methods for the operation and design of cyber physical systems in general, and energy efficient buildings in particular. The approach is to use an integrated framework: create models of complex systems from data; then design the associated sensing-communication-computation-control system; and finally create distributed estimation and control algorithms, along with execution platforms to implement these algorithms. A special emphasis is placed on adaptation. In particular, buildings and their environments change with time, as does the way in which buildings are used. The system must be designed to detect and respond to such changes. The proposed research brings together ideas from control theory, dynamical systems, stochastic processes, and embedded systems to address design and operation of complex cyber physical systems that were previously thought to be intractable. These approaches provide qualitative understanding of system behavior, algorithms for control, and their implementation in a networked execution platform. Insights gained by the application of model reduction and adaptation techniques will lead to significant developments in the underlying theory of modeling and control of complex systems. The research is expected to directly impact US industry through the development of integrated software-hardware solutions for smart buildings. Collaborations with United Technologies Research Center are planned to enhance this impact. The techniques developed are expected to apply to other complex cyber-physical systems with uncertain dynamics, such as the electric power grid. The project will enhance engineering education through the introduction of cross-disciplinary courses.

The objective of this inter-disciplinary research is to develop new technologies to transform the streets of a city into a hybrid transportation/communication system, called the Intelligent Road (iRoad), where autonomous wireless devices are co-located with traffic signals to form a wireless network that fuses real-time transportation data from all over the city to make a wide range of new applications possible. The approach is to build new capacities of quantitative bandwidth distribution, rate/delay assurance, and location-dependent security on a pervasive wireless platform through distributed queue management, adaptive rate control, and multi-layered trust. These new capacities lead to transformative changes in the way the transportation monitoring and control functions are designed and operated. Many technical challenges faced by the iRoad system are open problems. New theories/protocols developed in this project will support sophisticated bandwidth management, quality of service, multi-layered trust, and information fusion in a demanding environment where critical transportation functions are implemented. Solving these fundamental problems advances the state of the art in both wireless technologies and transportation engineering. The research outcome is likely to be broadly applicable in other wireless systems. The economic and societal impact of the iRoad system is tremendous at a time when the country is modernizing its ailing transportation infrastructure. It provides a pervasive communication infrastructure and engineering framework to build new applications such as real-time traffic map, online best-route query, intelligent fuel-efficient vehicles, etc. The research results will be disseminated through course materials, academic publication, industry connection, and presentations at the local transportation department.

The objective of this research is to understand how pervasive information changes energy production, distribution and use. The design of a more scalable and flexible electric infrastructure, encouraging efficient use, integrating local generation, and managing demand through awareness of energy availability and use over time, is investigated. The approach is to develop a cyber overlay on the energy distribution system in its physical manifestations: machine rooms, buildings, neighborhoods, isolated generation islands and regional grids. A scaled series of experimental energy networks will be constructed, to demonstrate monitoring, negotiation protocols, control algorithms and Intelligent Power Switches integrating information and energy flows in a datacenter, building, renewable energy: farm", and off-grid village. These will be generalized and validated through larger scale simulations. The proposal's intellectual merit is in understanding broadly how information enables energy efficiencies: through intelligent matching of loads to sources, via various levels of aggregation, and by managing how and when energy is delivered to demand, adapted in time and form to available supply. Bi-directional information exchange is integrated everywhere that power is transferred. Broader impacts include training diverse students, such as undergraduates and underrepresented groups, in a new interdisciplinary curriculum in information and energy technologies. Societal impact is achieved by demonstrating dramatic reductions in the carbon footprint of energy and its overall usage, greater penetration of renewables while avoiding additional fossil fuel plants, and shaping a new culture of energy awareness and management. The evolution of Computer Science will be accelerated to meet the challenges of cyber-physical information processing.

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.

The objective of this research project is to achieve fundamental advances in software technology that will enable building cyber-physical systems to allow citizens to see the environmental and health impacts of their daily activities through a citizen-driven body-worn mobile-phone-based commodity sensing platform. The approach is to create aspect-oriented extensions to a publish-subscribe architecture, called Open Rich Services (ORS), to provide a highly extensible and adaptive infrastructure. As one example, ORS will enable highly adaptive power management that not only adapts to current device conditions, but also the nature of the data, the data's application, and the presence and status of other sensors in the area. In this way, ORS will enable additional research advances in power management, algorithms, security and privacy during the project. A test-bed called CitiSense will be built, enabling in-the-world user and system studies for evaluating the approach and providing a glimpse of a future enhanced by cyber-physical systems. The research in this proposal will lead to fundamental advances in modularity techniques for composable adaptive systems, adaptive power management, cryptographic methods for open systems, interaction design for the mobile context, and statistical inference under multiple sources of noise. The scientific and engineering advances achieved through this proposal will advance our national capability to develop cyber-physical systems operating under decentralized control and severe resource constraints. The students trained under this project will become part of a new generation of researchers and practitioners prepared to advance the state of cyber-physical systems for the coming decades.

The goal of this project is to develop a semantic foundation, cross-layer system architecture and adaptation services to improve dependability in instrumented cyberphysical spaces (ICPS) based on the principles of "computation reflection". ICPSs integrate a variety of sensing devices to create a digital representation of the evolving physical world and its processes for use by applications such as critical infrastructure monitoring, surveillance and incident-site emergency response. This requires the underlying systems to be dependable despite disruptions caused by failures in sensing, communications, and computation. The digital state representation guides a range of adaptations at different layers of the ICPS (i.e. networking, sensing, applications, cross-layer) to achieve end-to-end dependability at both the infrastructure and information levels. Examples of techniques explored include mechanisms for reliable information delivery over multi-networks, quality aware data collection, semantic sensing and reconfiguration using overlapping capabilities of heterogeneous sensors. Such adaptations are driven by a formal-methods based runtime analysis of system components, resource availability and application dependability needs. Responsphere, a real-world ICPS infrastructure on the University of California at Irvine campus, will serve as a testbed for development and validation of the overall ?reflective? approach and the cross-layer adaptation techniques to achieve dependability. Students at different levels (graduate, undergraduate, K-12) will be given opportunities to gain experience with using and designing real-world applications in the Responsphere ICPS via courses, independent study projects and demonstration sessions. Students will benefit tremendously from exposure to new software development paradigms for the ICPSs that will be a part of the future living environments.

This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project is developing technology for ubiquitous event reporting and data gathering on the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and its ecological impacts. Traditional applications for monitoring disasters have relied on specialized, tightly-coupled, and expensive hardware and software platforms to capture, aggregate, and disseminate information on affected areas. We lack science and technology for rapid and dependable integration of computing and communication technology into natural and engineered physical systems, cyber-physical systems (CPS). The tragic Gulf oil spill of 2010 presents both a compelling need to fill this gap in research and a critical opportunity to help in relief efforts by deploying cutting-edge CPS research in the field. In particular, this CPS research is developing a cloud-supported mobile CPS application enabling community members to contribute as citizen scientists through sensor deployments and direct recording of events and ecological impacts of the Gulf oil spill, such as fish and bird kills. The project exploits the availability of smartphones (with sophisticated sensor packages, high-level programming APIs, and multiple network connectivity options) and cloud computing infrastructures that enable collecting and aggregating data from mobile applications. The goal is to develop a scientific basis for managing the quality-of-service (QoS), user coordination, sensor data dissemination, and validation issues that arise in mobile CPS disaster monitoring applications. The research will have many important broader impacts related to the Gulf oil spill disaster relief efforts, including providing help for the affected Gulf communities as they field and evaluate next-generation CPS research and build a sustained capability for capturing large snapshots of the ecological impact of the Gulf oil spill. The resulting environmental data will have lasting value for evaluating the consequences of the spill in multiple research fields, but especially in Marine Biology. The project is collaborating with Gulf area K-12 schools to integrate disaster and ecology monitoring activities into their curricula. The technologies developed (resource optimization techniques, data reporting protocol trade-off analysis, and empirical evaluation of social network coordination strategies for an open data environment) will provide a resource for the CPS research community. It is expected that project results will enable future efforts to create and validate CPS disaster response systems that can scale to hundreds of thousands of users and operate effectively in life-critical situations with scarce network and computing resources.