Dynamic Lines of Collaboration in CPS Disruption Response

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are emerging future engineered systems with combined efforts in cybernetics and advanced physical components. They are often designed for large and missioncritical systems, e.g., smart grids. The continuous availability of functionality is one of the important concerns by CPS stakeholders. Currently CPSs are still vulnerable to major disruptions. In this research we design the Dynamic Lines for Collaboration (DLOC) protocol for responding to disruptions in CPS. DLOC utilizes current advantages in a centralized computing model, HUBCI (high performance computing HUB with collaborative intelligence tools), and facility sensor networks deployed in physical and cyber domains with active middleware. Based on the hybrid centralized/distributed CPS structure, DLOC is hypothesized to be a better protocol for CPS disruption response than conventional centralized protocols. Experiments with an agent-based model are performed to test the DLOC effectiveness. The results indicate that by using DLOC protocol, CPS can have 12% lower emergency responder workload, 80% reduced subsystem downtime, 82% shorter disruption response time, and 30% increased link availability compared with the conventional centralized protocol. The performance advantages of DLOC over the common centralized methods demonstrate that a high performance computing center approach to disruption response is not sufficient. DLOC can also have a relatively higher information triage efficiency and increased robustness to network dynamics and information overload.