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

Program Solicitation
NSF 16-524

 

National Science Foundation

Third International Workshop on Science of Smart City Operations and Platforms Engineering (SCOPE) in partnership with Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC)

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.

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.

14th HONET-ICT International Conference "Smart Cities: Improving Quality of Life-Using ICT & IoT" Scope:

In recent years, we have seen a number of successful cyber-attacks against high-profile targets, which have demonstrated that resourceful and determined attackers can penetrate even highly secure systems. In light of these attacks, it becomes apparent that defenders of cyber-physical systems cannot focus solely on preventing attackers from penetrating their systems. Instead, they must also prepare to promptly detect and mitigate security breaches, thereby limiting the impact of successful attacks.

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.

This project advances the scientific knowledge on design methods for improving the resilience of civil infrastructures to disruptions. To improve resilience, critical services in civil infrastructure sectors must utilize new diagnostic tools and control algorithms that ensure survivability in the presence of both security attacks and random faults, and also include the models of incentives of human decision makers in the design process.

AquaSCALE is a cyber-physical-human middleware for gathering, analyzing and adapting operations of increasingly failure-prone community water services. Today, detection of anomalous events in civil infrastructures (e.g. water pipe breaks and leaks) is time consuming and often takes hours or days. AquaSCALE leverages dynamic data from multiple information sources including IoT sensing data, geophysical data, human input, and simulation and modeling engines to accurately and quickly identify vulnerable spots in water networks.