CPS: Medium: Collaborative Research: Mitigation strategies for enhancing performance while maintaining viability in cyber-physical systems

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Complex cyber-physical systems (CPS) that operate in dynamic and uncertain environments will inevitably encounter unanticipated situations during their operation. Examples range from naturally occurring faults in both the cyber and physical components to attacks launched by malicious entities with the purpose of disrupting normal operations. As infrastructures, e.g. energy, transportation, industrial systems and built environments, are getting smarter, the chance of a fault or attack increases. When this happens, it is essential that system behavior remains viable, i.e., it does not violate pre-specified operating constraints on run-time behavior. Preserving safety, for instance, is of paramount importance to avoid damage and possible loss of life. This project will develop strategies for mitigating the effects of such unanticipated situations, that seek to optimize for performance (measured by multiple metrics such as cost, efficiency, accuracy, etc.) without compromising viability. The emphasis will be on the automotive application domain, given the upcoming revolution brought by innovations such as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication and autonomous driving, and because of the safety-criticality of the transportation infrastructure. To ground our research on relevant problems, we will engage industrial partners. The outcomes of the project will be validated upon test scenarios drawn from the automotive industry. Fundamental issues arising when safety-critical CPS operate in uncertain environments will be addressed, with the objective of obtaining a better understanding of, and developing optimal or near-optimal strategies for dealing with, emergent problems that arise from the interaction of resource-allocation and control strategies in such systems. One of the novelties of the technical approach adopted in this project is to closely integrate three different CPS perspectives control theory, automotive & aerospace application domain-knowledge, and real-time resource management & scheduling in order to develop run-time mitigation strategies for complex CPS's operating in dynamic and uncertain environments, and exposed to a variety of faults. Such an integrated approach will allow for the identification of emergent problems that arise from the interaction of resource-allocation and control algorithms, that may otherwise remain undiscovered if the control and resource-allocation aspects were considered separately.The general design-time and run-time tools for creating resilient CPSs will be guided by the implementation and evaluation of the research in simulation and on laboratory test-beds upon three applications from the automotive domain: fault resilience for variable-valve internal combustion engines; fail-safe energy management for hybrid-electric vehicles; and robust sensor management for autonomous vehicles.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.