Foundations Of Resilient CybEr-physical Systems (FORCES) aimed to help protect the nation's critical infrastructure from attack and to ensure its robust, secure, and efficient operation. To this end, FORCES research and development advanced the resilience of large-scale networked cyber-physical systems (CPS) in the key areas of energy delivery, transportation, and energy management in buildings. In education, FORCES expanded CPS-related course offerings and led programs that inspired students and young researchers. In outreach, FORCES actively engaged with the broader community, greatly extending the program’s influence both nationally and internationally.

In research, FORCES integrated the design of resilient control and economic incentive mechanisms to improve efficiency, security, fault tolerance, and operational resilience of cyber-physical systems (CPS). To enable resilient CPS design and operation, FORCES provided scientific methods for co-design of resilient control and economic incentive schemes and technological tools for implementing them, primarily large-scale networked systems that directly interface with humans, or human-CPS (h-CPS).

These methods and tools will enable “high confidence” operation of CPS with attributes such as functional correctness (correct by design), robustness to reliability failures (fault tolerance), and survivability during cyber-attacks (operation through attacks). This was achieved by (1) tools for attack/fault diagnosis and robust networked control that withstand a wide range of attacks and faults; (2) learning and control for stochastic hybrid systems that integrate human actions with CPS operations; and (3) model-based design that assure semantically consistent representations.

To incentivize resiliency investments in CPS predominantly managed by privately owned entities with conflicting objectives, FORCES developed (1) economic incentive tools using game theoretic methods to improve CPS reliability and security; (2) mechanism design for CPS resilience; and (3) management of interdependent risks.

The legacy of FORCES is both the foundations (theory and implementation methodology) for the co-design of resilient control and economic incentive schemes and the modeling of public and private information incompleteness in environments with interdependent failures and supply-demand uncertainties, from both a strategic and an operational perspectives, thus integrating the spatiotemporal and hybrid dynamics of networked systems, large number of interactions with interdependencies, and effects of public and private uncertainties.

In education, FORCES developed new graduate-level courses in resilient network control, game theory, and mechanism design. FORCES also created a multi-year seminar/mini-course on the principals of economic theory and cyber-physical systems, aimed at both economists and engineers. FORCES also ran successful programs for underrepresented minority high school students and middle school girls that used engaging curricula, hands-on experimentation, student-led instruction, and capstone projects. Programs were evaluated to measure the impacts of education interventions on student knowledge, engagement, and interest in CPS-related topics.

In outreach, FORCES research was regularly presented at top conferences in the U.S. and globally. FORCES leadership championed the creation of a new conference, the ACM International Conference on High Confidence Networked Systems (HiCoNS), at CPSWeek which fostered collaborations between researchers from control and systems theory, embedded systems, game theory, software verification, formal methods, and computer security addressing various aspects of resilience of CPS.

Additionally, large-scale research initiatives grew from FORCES, including multi-year, multi-university, interdisciplinary programs focused on resilience of societal-scale CPS, the future of urban mobility, and digital transformation.

Last Modified: 08/05/2022
Modified by: Sosale S Sastry