“Critical infrastructure systems provide the lifeline that physically ties communities and facilitates quality of life and economic growth. When critical infrastructures fail, the consequences may be tremendous, in view of societal, health and economic aspects.”
FAULT-ADAPTIVE is a pioneering research initiative, aimed at designing and analyzing “smart” algorithms for real-time data processing, capable of improving the performance and fault tolerance of critical infrastructures such as power distribution systems, water systems and transportation networks.
Modern society relies on the availability and smooth operation of complex engineering systems. As such engineering systems are becoming more complex, large-scale and distributed, the need for advanced monitoring and control algorithms is becoming more crucial and challenging. Moreover, the issues of fault detection, diagnosis and automatic recovery are especially important as these engineering systems are required to operate under more demanding operating conditions and more unstructured environments.
“FAULT-ADAPTIVE” contributes to the need for a systematic framework to enhance the reliability, fault-tolerance and sustainability of complex distributed dynamical systems. A hierarchical fault diagnosis architecture will be developed, with neighbouring fault diagnosis agents cooperating at a local level, while transmitting their information, as needed, to a regional monitoring agent, responsible for integrating in real-time local information into a large-scale “picture” of the health of the infrastructure.
The research will involve the development of tools and the design of methodologies that would facilitate early detection and accommodation of “small” faults or unexpected events, before they cause significant disruption or complete system failures in complex distributed dynamical systems.
The research is funded by the European Research Council as part of an Advanced Grant awarded to Professor Marios Polycarpou. The project started in April 2012 and it will last five years.
Project website: https://www.kios.ucy.ac.cy/fault-adaptive