The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

The Center for Education and Research in
Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

Cyber-Collaborative Conflicts and Errors Prevention and Detection for Network Resilience

Principal Investigator: Shimon Nof

Conflicts and errors are unavoidable disruptions in complex networks such as energy grids, supply chains, and collaborative decision support systems. We aim to design and implement real-time, AI-based algorithms for effective and efficient automated conflict and error (CE) prevention, detection, and recovery (PDR) for the resilience and security of such complex systems. The relationships of different CE play an essential role: Local CE can propagate to large-scale system damage according to CE dependencies if not handled correctly and in time. On the other hand, the structural information of the CE network can improve PDR operations. Constraint-based models are designed based on the complex network theory to define CE dependencies and provide prescriptive abstractions for real-world systems. A centralized algorithm taking advantage of network structure, a decentralized algorithm enabling parallelism with distributed PDR agents, and hybrid algorithms are designed to prevent, detect, and recover from CEs. The established and new algorithms use relationships between CE constraints to improve efficiency. Analytical studies and simulation experiments on various systems have been conducted to validate the latest algorithms and compare their performance to that of traditional algorithms. Results show that for effective PDR, new algorithms shall be used according to several performance measures: Response time, coverage ability, preventability, and damage minimization. The machine learning and alignment between algorithms and network characteristics, i.e., centralized algorithms for centralized networks and decentralized algorithms for decentralized networks, improve PDR. During the PDR operations, the collaboration between PDR agents also needs to be efficiently coordinated and optimized to minimize the potentially cascading effects of CE.

Personnel

Other PIs: Hao Zhong Xin W. Chen Rodrigo Reyes Levalle Win P.V. Nguyen

Other Faculty: Xin W. Chen Rodrigo Reyes Levalle Win P.V. Nguyen

Students: Vivek Sangani

Representative Publications

Keywords: AI-based collaborative control, Complex systems, Detection algorithms, Error detection, Network topologies, Prevention