SaTC 2.0: RES: U.S.-Ireland R&D Partnership: Enhancing Resilience and Safety in Industrial Control Systems through Integrated IT and OT Modeling and Analysis

About This Grant

Modern industrial control systems are becoming increasingly interconnected through advances in digital communication, sensing, and automation. This connectivity brings substantial benefits for efficiency and reliability, but it also exposes critical infrastructure to sophisticated cyber and physical threats. Attacks on pipelines and power systems in recent years have demonstrated that a single breach in the information-technology layer can cascade rapidly into the operational-technology environment, disrupting essential services and endangering public safety. This project addresses this growing challenge by developing an integrated scientific framework for understanding how attacks propagate across these layers and by designing new methods that enable control systems to anticipate, withstand, and adapt to adverse events. Through collaboration and open educational activities, the project will help build a well-prepared workforce capable of advancing the security and resilience of future industrial systems. The technical goal of the project is to create a unified modeling, analysis, and control framework for resilient operation of industrial control systems under adversarial uncertainty. The research integrates hybrid-systems modeling, formal verification, dynamic learning, and game-theoretic decision making to capture the coupled behavior of information-technology and operational-technology components, as well as their interplay with potential attackers. The work develops analytical tools to quantify system safety and performance, introduces predictive and adaptive control mechanisms that can learn and respond in real time, and evaluates these methods through experiments on a state-of-the-art microgrid testbed. The results are expected to establish scientific foundations for resilient control, advance computational tools for assessing operational safety, and produce software prototypes and benchmarks broadly useful to researchers, industry practitioners, and critical-infrastructure operators. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.