Resilience, Safety, and Security in Tree-structured Civil Networks

Civil infrastructure networks (CIN) critically support modern society by distributing resources and protecting communities from hazards.

Distributed control and monitoring of CIN to meet network demand under the network efficiency and cost constraints also poses physical security and cyber-security challenges.The resilience of civil infrastructure to disruptive events is the overarching topic of the present proposal.

The project goal is to devise a coherent system-theoretical platform for resilience analysis of CIN as well as resilience-informed control of those.More specifically, a CIN is modeled as a cyber-physical system (CPS) whose physical layer is a transportation network equipped with actuator and sensor nodes interlaced with a computer network that implements control and monitoring of the physical layer.

The scope is limited to the consideration of CPS with a tree-structured physical layer and covers a broad class of pipeline systems, i.e. networked systems transporting single- or multi-phase fluids.

Failures, breakdowns, natural hazards, and cyberattacks are considered potential disruptive events.The project is planned for three years and will be conducted along three main threads: Mathematical modeling of CIM as CPS; Model-based assessment of resilience via operational indices; Resilience-informed control of CIM.

The feasibility and efficacy of the developed mathematical models and algorithms will be evaluated with respect to urban water and wastewater networks.