Large-scale critical infrastructure systems, including energy and transportation networks, comprise millions of individual elements (human, software and hardware) whose actions may be inconsequential in isolation but profoundly important in aggregate. The focus of this project is on the coordination of these elements via ubiquitous sensing, communications, computation, and control, with an emphasis on the electric grid. The project integrates ideas from economics and behavioral science into frameworks grounded in control theory and power systems. Our central construct is that of a ?resource cluster,? a collection of distributed resources (ex: solar PV, storage, deferrable loads) that can be coordinated to efficiently and reliably offer services (ex: power delivery) in the face of uncertainty (ex: PV output, consumer behavior). Three topic areas form the core of the project: (a) the theoretical foundations for the ?cluster manager? concept and complementary tools to characterize the capabilities of a resource cluster; (b) centralized resource coordination strategies that span multiple time scales via innovations in stochastic optimal control theory; and (c) decentralized coordination strategies based on cluster manager incentives and built upon foundations of non-cooperative dynamic game theory. These innovations will improve the operation of infrastructure systems via a cyber-physical-social approach to the problem of resource allocation in complex infrastructures. By transforming the role of humans from passive resource recipients to active participants in the electric power system, the project will facilitate energy security for the nation, and climate change mitigation. The project will also engage K-12 students through lab-visits and lectures; address the undergraduate demand for power systems training through curricular innovations at the intersection of cyber-systems engineering and physical power systems; and equip graduate students with the multi-disciplinary training in power systems, communications, control, optimization and economics to become leaders in innovation.

Cyber physical systems (CPSs) are merging into major mobile systems of our society, such as public transportation, supply chains, and taxi networks. Past researchers have accumulated significant knowledge for designing cyber physical systems, such as for military surveillance, infrastructure protection, scientific exploration, and smart environments, but primarily in relatively stationary settings, i.e., where spatial and mobility diversity is limited. Differently, mobile CPSs interact with phenomena of interest at different locations and environments, and where the context information (e.g., network availability and connectivity) about these physical locations might not be available. This unique feature calls for new solutions to seamlessly integrate mobile computing with the physical world, including dynamic access to multiple wireless technologies. The required solutions are addressed by (i) creating a network control architecture based on novel predictive hierarchical control and that accounts for characteristics of wireless communication, (ii) developing formal network control models based on in-situ network system identification and cross-layer optimization, and (iii) designing and implementing a reference implementation on a small scale wireless and vehicular test-bed based on law enforcement vehicles. The results can improve all mobile transportation systems such as future taxi control and dispatch systems. In this application advantages are: (i) reducing time for drivers to find customers; (ii) reducing time for passengers to wait; (iii) avoiding and preventing traffic congestion; (iv) reducing gas consumption and operating cost; (v) improving driver and vehicle safety, and (vi) enforcing municipal regulation. Class modules developed on mobile computing and CPS will be used at the four participating Universities and then be made available via the Web.

Wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSAN) are systems consisting of numerous sensing and actuation devices that interact with the environment and coordinate their activities over a wireless communication network. This project studies "resilience" in WSANs. A resilient system is one that maintains an active awareness of surrounding threats and reacts to those threats in a manner that returns the system to operational normalcy in finite time. This project's approach to resilient WSANs rests on two fundamental trends. One trend uses machine-to-machine (M2M) communication networks that promise wireless networking with greater peak bit-rates and reliability than previously possible. The other trend comes from recent ideas that use quantization and event-triggered feedback in a unified manner to reduce bit rates required by real-time control systems. This project will evaluate and demonstrate this integrated control/communication approach to resilience on a multi-robotic testbed consisting of unmanned ground vehicles. The testbed will integrate M2M communication hardware/software with a multi-robot control architecture addressing task coordination and platform stabilization. This project broadens its impact through organizations and programs on and around the Notre Dame campus that facilitate industrial engagement and technology transfer. The project will engage undergraduate and graduate students to support the project's testbed and algorithm development. The project will augment and re-organize Notre Dame's Cyber-Physical System (CPS) curriculum by integrating the results of this project into courses.

This project explores balancing performance considerations and power consumption in cyber-physical systems, through algorithms that switch among different modes of operation (e.g., low-power/high-power, on/off, or mobile/static) in response to environmental conditions. The main theoretical contribution is a computational, hybrid optimal control framework that is connected to a number of relevant target applications where physical modeling, control design, and software architectures all constitute important components. The fundamental research in this program advances state-of-the-art along four different dimensions, namely (1) real-time, hybrid optimal control algorithms for power management, (2) power-management in mobile sensor networks, (3) distributed power-aware architectures for infrastructure management, and (4) power-management in embedded multi-core processors. The expected outcome, which is to enable low-power devices to be deployed in a more effective manner, has implications on a number of application domains, including distributed sensor and communication networks, and intelligent and efficient buildings. The team represents both a research university (Georgia Institute of Technology) and an undergraduate teaching university (York College of Pennsylvania) in order to ensure that the educational components are far-reaching and cut across traditional educational boundaries. The project involves novel, inductive-based learning modules, where graduate students team with undergraduate researchers.

Autonomous navigation in unknown and dynamic environments has been a major challenge for synthetic mobile robotic agents. On the other hand, insects can easily solve such complex navigational problems and demonstrate remarkably stable and optimized locomotion skills in almost any environment. This project aims to develop a mobile sensor network where insects are used as mobile biological-robotic (biobotic) nodes. Insects, in fact, build a "natural" sensor network through the use of their biological sensing organs and release of chemical, mechanical and optical cues to communicate the information to the rest of the group. In the scope of this project, a novel cyber-physical communication network will be established among the individual insect in addition to the aforementioned natural one. For this, insects will be equipped with synthetic electronic sensors to sense additional cues, neuromuscular stimulation systems to direct the control of the insect and microcontrollers with radios to establish an RF link between the insects. This novel network will enable operation of insect biobots in complicated and uncertain dynamic environments for applications such as environmental sensing and search-and-rescue operations after natural disasters. The unique interdisciplinary nature of this project will help engineers to reach to younger generations and train them to be able to look at engineering problems from a cyberphysical systems point of view. Planned activities include development of lab modules and demos by undergraduate and graduate students to teach K-12 students and their teachers through our on-going collaborations with educational partners. These demos will also be instrumental during nation level efforts to promote graduate education to underrepresented minority students.

Large-scale critical infrastructure systems, including energy and transportation networks, comprise millions of individual elements (human, software and hardware) whose actions may be inconsequential in isolation but profoundly important in aggregate. The focus of this project is on the coordination of these elements via ubiquitous sensing, communications, computation, and control, with an emphasis on the electric grid. The project integrates ideas from economics and behavioral science into frameworks grounded in control theory and power systems. Our central construct is that of a ?resource cluster,? a collection of distributed resources (ex: solar PV, storage, deferrable loads) that can be coordinated to efficiently and reliably offer services (ex: power delivery) in the face of uncertainty (ex: PV output, consumer behavior). Three topic areas form the core of the project: (a) the theoretical foundations for the ?cluster manager? concept and complementary tools to characterize the capabilities of a resource cluster; (b) centralized resource coordination strategies that span multiple time scales via innovations in stochastic optimal control theory; and (c) decentralized coordination strategies based on cluster manager incentives and built upon foundations of non-cooperative dynamic game theory. These innovations will improve the operation of infrastructure systems via a cyber-physical-social approach to the problem of resource allocation in complex infrastructures. By transforming the role of humans from passive resource recipients to active participants in the electric power system, the project will facilitate energy security for the nation, and climate change mitigation. The project will also engage K-12 students through lab-visits and lectures; address the undergraduate demand for power systems training through curricular innovations at the intersection of cyber-systems engineering and physical power systems; and equip graduate students with the multi-disciplinary training in power systems, communications, control, optimization and economics to become leaders in innovation.

This NSF Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Frontiers project "Foundations Of Resilient CybEr-physical Systems (FORCES)" focuses on the resilient design of large-scale networked CPS systems that directly interface with humans. FORCES aims to provide comprehensive tools that allow the CPS designers and operators to combine resilient control (RC) algorithms with economic incentive (EI) schemes. Scientific Contributions The project is developing RC tools to withstand a wide-range of attacks and faults; learning and control algorithms which integrate human actions with spatio-temporal and hybrid dynamics of networked CPS systems; and model-based design to assure semantically consistent representations across all branches of the project. Operations of networked CPS systems naturally depend on the systemic social institutions and the individual deployment choices of the humans who use and operate them. The presence of incomplete and asymmetric information among these actors leads to a gap between the individually and socially optimal equilibrium resiliency levels. The project is developing EI schemes to reduce this gap. The core contributions of the FORCES team, which includes experts in control systems, game theory, and mechanism design, are the foundations for the co-design of RC and EI schemes and technological tools for implementing them. Expected Impacts Resilient CPS infrastructure is a critical National Asset. FORCES is contributing to the development of new Science of CPS by being the first project that integrates networked control with game theoretic tools and the economic incentives of human decision makers for resilient CPS design and operation. The FORCES integrated co-design philosophy is being validated on two CPS domains: electric power distribution and consumption, and transportation networks. These design prototypes are being tested in real world scenarios. The team's research efforts are being complemented by educational offerings on resilient CPS targeted to a large and diverse audience.

Cyber physical systems (CPSs) are merging into major mobile systems of our society, such as public transportation, supply chains, and taxi networks. Past researchers have accumulated significant knowledge for designing cyber physical systems, such as for military surveillance, infrastructure protection, scientific exploration, and smart environments, but primarily in relatively stationary settings, i.e., where spatial and mobility diversity is limited. Differently, mobile CPSs interact with phenomena of interest at different locations and environments, and where the context information (e.g., network availability and connectivity) about these physical locations might not be available. This unique feature calls for new solutions to seamlessly integrate mobile computing with the physical world, including dynamic access to multiple wireless technologies. The required solutions are addressed by (i) creating a network control architecture based on novel predictive hierarchical control and that accounts for characteristics of wireless communication, (ii) developing formal network control models based on in-situ network system identification and cross-layer optimization, and (iii) designing and implementing a reference implementation on a small scale wireless and vehicular test-bed based on law enforcement vehicles. The results can improve all mobile transportation systems such as future taxi control and dispatch systems. In this application advantages are: (i) reducing time for drivers to find customers; (ii) reducing time for passengers to wait; (iii) avoiding and preventing traffic congestion; (iv) reducing gas consumption and operating cost; (v) improving driver and vehicle safety, and (vi) enforcing municipal regulation. Class modules developed on mobile computing and CPS will be used at the four participating Universities and then be made available via the Web.

Cyber physical systems (CPSs) are merging into major mobile systems of our society, such as public transportation, supply chains, and taxi networks. Past researchers have accumulated significant knowledge for designing cyber physical systems, such as for military surveillance, infrastructure protection, scientific exploration, and smart environments, but primarily in relatively stationary settings, i.e., where spatial and mobility diversity is limited. Differently, mobile CPSs interact with phenomena of interest at different locations and environments, and where the context information (e.g., network availability and connectivity) about these physical locations might not be available. This unique feature calls for new solutions to seamlessly integrate mobile computing with the physical world, including dynamic access to multiple wireless technologies. The required solutions are addressed by (i) creating a network control architecture based on novel predictive hierarchical control and that accounts for characteristics of wireless communication, (ii) developing formal network control models based on in-situ network system identification and cross-layer optimization, and (iii) designing and implementing a reference implementation on a small scale wireless and vehicular test-bed based on law enforcement vehicles. The results can improve all mobile transportation systems such as future taxi control and dispatch systems. In this application advantages are: (i) reducing time for drivers to find customers; (ii) reducing time for passengers to wait; (iii) avoiding and preventing traffic congestion; (iv) reducing gas consumption and operating cost; (v) improving driver and vehicle safety, and (vi) enforcing municipal regulation. Class modules developed on mobile computing and CPS will be used at the four participating Universities and then be made available via the Web.

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.