This award is to support a national workshop in Pittsburgh, PA, November 8-9, 2007 in the area of Networked Embedded Control Systems. This one of several workshops in a series of activities concerned with high-confidence and certifiable software and systems, sponsored in cooperation with the High Confidence Software and Systems (HCSS) Coordinating Group (CG) under the NSTC Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Subcommittee. This workshop is co-funded by NSF and NIST.
The nation's critical physical infrastructure depends crucially on SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) and DCS (Digital Control Systems). Power networks, oil, gas, and water networks, chemical process control, transportation networks, the heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems of buildings depend critically on the sensing, monitoring, gathering and control of information from distributed sensing devices. It is clear that these devices have been deployed in ad-hoc fashion in our infrastructures and are widely used in a number of different kinds of applications including economic load dispatch, security monitoring, regulation of building climate and other such functions. As our use of ubiquitous computing and communication devices has increased we have gradually built in greater functionality into our SCADA/DCS systems. The by-product of these technological advances has been a lack of planned deployment of what we may refer to as high confidence devices and software. The purpose of this workshop is to assess research needs and to develop a roadmap and research agenda for fundamental research in key technologies for not only reducing the vulnerabilities of existing SCADA systems but also planning the next generation of distributed network embedded control systems for our infrastructure.
