Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems (INFEWS)

Program Solicitation
NSF 16-524

 

National Science Foundation

Vehicle systems, being either ground/air/water vehicles, require hundreds/thousands of battery cells to meet their power and energy needs. In this project, we aim to develop comprehensive management solutions of such large-scale batteries with the joint consideration of peak power, operation time, and battery life for vehicle electrification.

The exponential growth of information and communication technologies have caused a profound shift in the way humans engineer systems leading to the emergence of closed-loop systems involving strong integration and coordination of physical and cyber components, often referred to as cyber-physical systems (CPSs). Because of these disruptive changes, physical systems can now be attacked through cyberspace and cyberspace can be attacked through physical means.

This project is focused on the fundamental research in establishing a foundational framework towards the development of an autonomous Cyber-Physical System (CPS) through distributed computation in a Networked Control Systems (NCS) paradigm. Specific attention is focused on an application where the computational, and communication challenges are unique due to the sheer dimensionality of the physical system. An example of such CPS is the smart power grid, which includes large-scale deployment of distributed and networked Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and wind energy resources.

Smart grid includes two interdependent infrastructures: power transmission and distribution network, and the supporting telecommunications network. Complex interactions among these infrastructures lead to new pathways for attack and failure propagation that are currently not well understood. This innovative project takes a holistic multilevel approach to understand and characterize the interdependencies between these two infrastructures, and devise mechanisms to enhance their robustness.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are being increasingly deployed in critical infrastructures such as electric-power, water, transportation, and other networks. These deployments are facilitating real-time monitoring and closed-loop control by exploiting the advances in wireless sensor-actuator networks, the internet of “everything,” data-driven analytics, and machine-to-machine interfaces. CPS operations depend on the synergy of computational and physical components.