NSF Workshop on State-of-the-Art and Challenges in Resilience

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

Our society is crucially dependent on several interdependent critical infrastructure systems and processes for operating these systems, such as, industrial control systems, IoT systems underlying our smart cities, large-scale cyber systems, and built environments like transportation and building infrastructures. These are subjected to various kinds of hazards and faults, both natural and malicious, often leading to user-visible failures. The research community has developed a set of tools to analyze the failure modes of the infrastructures and systematically build in resilience. This workshop is meant to bring together select members of these communities who have focused on resilient and adaptive cyberinfrastructures, resilient cyber-physical systems, and scientific foundations of resilient socio-technical systems. The participants will be thought and action leaders in the area of social-technical resilient systems, drawn from external academic researchers and industrial practitioners. The workshop will stress the scientific and foundational research on resilience at the interface of multiple domains, and to promote applications of societal importance in these domains. This workshop will highlight the synergies through discussion of foundational techniques and case studies. Then it will present the salient research and practice challenges that can serve as a call-to-arms for the respective technical communities. The workshop has three broad aims. First, to capture in one accessible forum best practices in research on resilience spanning multiple research communities. Second, to disseminate to the community what are the broad open research challenges, along with prior and ongoing work that can be leveraged to attack these challenges. Third, to provide artifacts (video lectures, design documents, software releases) documenting the progress the community has made in resilient system design and implementation. The workshop, to be held at Purdue University, will reflect on the current state-of-art and state-of-practice of resilient system design and will lay out the broad research and translation challenges that we will need to address to make our infrastructures truly resilient to natural failures. The workshop will be broad-based in the topical areas of cyber, cyber-physical, and socio-technical systems. It will draw from the technical contributions made by the communities, put them in the context of evolving technological changes, and identify broad-based topic areas where resilience work is both needed and likely to have high impact. The NSF communities that are natural fits within this workshop are: Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC), Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), Computer Systems Research (CSR), Software and Hardware Foundations (SHF), and Engineering Design and System Engineering (EDSE). We will invite researchers from these communities from various universities and at different levels of seniority to participate in the technical talks, panel discussions, and poster sessions. There will also be select industry and national lab participants. Three specific deliverables will come out of the workshop: reports (one for each topical area) documenting the current state-of-art, state-of-practice, and open research challenges in designing, developing, and maintaining resilient infrastructures; organized and curated material (slides, audio, video) of talks and panels; archive of posters presented by upcoming researchers on current research directions. 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.