The concept of a "smart city" is ubiquitous with data; however, most urban data today lacks the spatial and temporal resolution to understand processes that unfold on timescales of seconds or minutes, such as the dispersion of pollutants. A better understanding of these dynamics can provide information to residents, cyclists or pedestrians who may wish to use air quality data as they navigate urban spaces. This project leverages existing street furniture, integrating air quality and environmental sensors into commercial solar powered, networked waste stations. Sensors embedded in BigBelly waste stations in Chicago and other cities will collect data that will allow researchers to explore critical questions that must be understood in order to begin to develop and drive policies, measurement strategies, and predictive computational models related to the feedback loop between traffic flow and air quality. The partnership with BigBelly, with nearly 30,000 waste stations in place globally, provides a channel through which sensors can be deployed in many cities. The project brings together computer science, cyber-physical systems, distributed systems, and sensor systems expertise to explore technical and societal challenges and opportunities of urban-scale embedded systems in the public sphere, initially related to understanding and ultimately managing urban air quality. Sensors embedded in BigBelly waste stations in Chicago and other cities will explore (1) the spatial and temporal dynamics of air quality in urban canyons, informing the sensor network resolution needed to drive traffic change policies and to provide healthy air quality routing information to cyclists and pedestrians; and (2) how urban topology (natural and built) affects these dynamics and associated required measurement resolutions. These are critical questions that must be understood in order to begin to develop and drive policies, measurement strategies, and predictive computational models related to the feedback loop between traffic flow and air quality. Critical challenges include (1) power management with respect to sensor sampling, in-situ processing, and transmission; (2) ensuring data quality; and (3) providing data in forms that are actionable and understandable to policy makers and the general public. All data will be published in near-real time with web-based analysis tools for use by scientists, educators, policy makers, and residents, and with application programming interfaces (API's) for application development. By developing an open source, readily deployed urban embedded systems infrastructure leveraging a widely deployed commercial platform, the project can enable science, education, and outreach in many cities, national parks, and educational institutions worldwide.

This project will design next-generation defense mechanisms to protect critical infrastructures, such as power grids, large industrial plants, and water distribution systems. These critical infrastructures are complex primarily due to the integration of cyber and physical components, the presence of high-order behaviors and functions, and an intricate and large interconnection pattern. Malicious attackers can exploit the complexity of the infrastructure, and compromise a system's functionality through cyber attacks (that is hacking into the computation and communication systems) and/or physical attacks (tampering with the actuators, sensors and the control system). This work will develop mathematical models of critical infrastructures and attacks, develop intelligent control-theoretic security mechanisms, and validate the findings on an industry-accredited simulation platform. This project will directly impact national security and economic competitiveness, and the results will be available and useful to utility companies. To accompany the scientific advances, the investigators will also engage in educational efforts to bring this research to the classroom at UCR, and will disseminate their results via scientific publications. The work will also create several opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to engage in research at UCR, one of the nation's most ethnically diverse research-intensive institutions. This study encompasses theoretical, computational, and experimental research at UCR aimed at characterizing vulnerabilities of complex cyber-physical systems, with a focus on electric power networks, and control-theoretic defense mechanisms to ensure protection and graceful performance degradation against accidental faults and malicious attacks. This project proposes a transformative approach to cyber-physical security, which builds on a unified control-theoretic framework to model cyber-physical systems, attacks, and defense strategies. This project will undertake three main research initiatives ranging from fundamental scientific and engineering research to analysis using industry-accepted simulation tools: (1) modeling and analysis of cyber-physical attacks, and their impact on system stability and performance; (2) design of monitors to reveal and distinguish between accidental and malignant contingencies; and (3) synthesis of adaptive defense strategies for stochastic and highly dynamic cyber-physical systems. Results will first be characterized from a pure control-theoretic perspective with focus on stochastic, switching, and dynamic cyber-physical systems, so as to highlight fundamental research challenges, and then specialized for the case of smart grid, so as to clarify the implementation of monitors, attacks, and defense strategies. The findings and strategies will be validated for the case of power networks by using the RTDS simulation system, which is an industry-accredited tool for real-time tests of dynamic behavior, faults, attacks, monitoring systems, and defensive strategies.

Intellectual Merit: Recent developments in nanostructures manufacturing, sensing and wireless networking, will soon enable us to deploy Flow-based Cyber-Physical Systems equipped with sensing and actuation capabilities for a broad range of applications. Some of these applications will be safety critical, including water distribution monitoring (i.e., critical national infrastructure systems particularly vulnerable to a variety of attacks, including contamination with deadly agents) and interventional medicine (i.e., a medical branch that makes use of tiny devices introduced in a living body through small incisions, to detect and treat diseases). The goal of this project is to advance our fundamental understanding, through a robust mathematical framework, of emerging field of Flow-based Cyber-Physical System. The project develops new architectures, models, metrics, algorithms and protocols for optimal sensing, communication and actuation in Flow-based Cyber-Physical System deployed on-demand (i.e., reactively, when sensing and actuation is needed) or proactively. Flow-based Cyber Physical Systems consist of mobile sensor nodes and static nodes, aware of their location. For stringent requirements (e.g., form factor, cost, energy budget) nodes may or may not possess node-to-node communication capabilities. Due to the lack of localization infrastructure, mobile sensor nodes infer their location only by proximity to static nodes. Sensor nodes are moved by the flow in the network, detect events of interest and proximity to static nodes, communicate and actuate. This research will enable, for example, water distribution monitoring systems to accurately and timely detect events of interest in the infrastructure and to react to these events. It may enable doctors to detect diseases and deliver medication with microscopic precision. Broader Impacts: Ultimately, the outcomes of this research will have impact on CPS that operate in critical modes and environments and control critical infrastructures and medical applications. The results from this research may also foster new research directions in CPS applications. The PI will integrate the research results in newly approved courses on CPS at Texas A&M and disseminate course materials online through the project website and Rice University Connections Consortium. This project will also offer research opportunities to undergraduate students, underrepresented groups, and high school students participating in the Texas Science Olympiad and National Science Olympiad.

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.

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 pr ovide 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.

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 pr ovide 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.