Necmiye Ozay receives NASA Early Career Faculty Award for research in cyber-physical systems

Prof. Necmiye Ozay, assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was awarded a NASA Early Career Faculty award for her project, “Run-time anomaly detection and mitigation in information-rich cyber-physical systems.” Her research will be designed to assist in future missions in space, while being applicable to a wide range of cyber-physical systems.

Next generation space missions require autonomous systems to operate without human intervention for long periods of times in highly dynamic environments. Such systems are vulnerable to software and/or hardware failures due to unexpected internal or external factors. Moreover, small anomalies, if not detected and isolated in a timely manner, can cascade through the system resulting in catastrophic outcomes, especially in highly dynamic missions where fail safe is not an option. This signifies the need for effective methods for integrated system health management, automated data analysis for decision making and verification and validation.

The objective of this project is to develop the scientific foundation and associated algorithmic tools for synthesis of decentralized passive and active monitors for sensor-rich networked cyber-physical systems from heterogeneous sensory data.

The potential benefits of the proposed research include (i) reductions in the design time of next generation space systems by automating synthesis of monitoring algorithms instead of hand-coded built-in tests, (ii) reductions in system cost by the potential to replace hardware redundancy with software-based solutions, (iii) increase in the time systems operate reliably by enabling timely detection of anomalies and reducing their cascading effects.

Prof. Ozay plans to demonstrate the techniques she and her team develops on two university-scale testbeds: (i) vehicular energy networks, and (ii) human-robot teams for exploration missions with limited communication.