Keynote Plenary

How to manage or control a heterogeneous, widely dispersed, yet globally interconnected system is a serious technological problem in any case. It is even more complex and difficult to control it for optimal efficiency and maximum benefit to the ultimate consumers while still allowing all its business components to compete fairly and freely.

From a broader view, global trends toward interconnectedness, privatization, deregulation, economic development, accessibility of information, and the continued technical trend of rapidly advancing information and telecommunication technologies all suggest that the complexity, interactivity, and interdependence of infrastructure networks will continue to grow.

Virtually every crucial economic and social function depends on the secure, reliable operation of energy, telecommunications, transportation, financial, and other infrastructures. From a strategic R&D viewpoint, the agility and robustness/survivability of large-scale dynamic networks that face new and unanticipated operating conditions is being addressed. A major challenge is posed by the lack of a unified mathematical framework with robust tools for modeling, simulation, control and optimization of time-critical operations in complex multicomponent and multiscaled networks.

Mathematical models of such complex systems are typically vague (or may not even exist); moreover, existing and classical methods of solution are either not available, or are not sufficiently powerful. Any complex dynamic infrastructure network typically has many layers, decision-making units and is vulnerable to various types of disturbances.

Management of disturbances in all such networks, and prevention of undesirable cascading effects throughout and between networks, requires a basic understanding of the true system dynamics, rather than mere sequences of steady-state operations. In addition, in many complex networks, the human participants themselves are both the most susceptible to failure and the most adaptable in the management of recovery.

In any situation subject to rapid changes, completely centralized control requires multiple, high-data-rate, two-way, communication links, a powerful central computing facility, and an elaborate operations control center. But all of these are liable to disruption at the very time when they are most needed, i.e., when the system is stressed by natural disasters, purposeful attack, or unusually high demands. Effective, intelligent, distributed control is required that would enable parts of the networks to remain operational and even automatically re-configure in the event of local failures or even threats of failure.

This presentation briefly describes holistic risk-managed dynamical systems approaches to analysis of the interdependent national infrastructure that build on advances in the mathematics of complexity, methods of probabilistic risk assessment, and techniques for fast computation and interactive simulation with the goal of increased agility and resilience for large-scale systems.

Dr. Massoud Amin, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, holds the Honeywell/H.W. Sweatt Chair in Technological Leadership, and is the Director of the Technological Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities. In addition to his administrative and research responsibilities, he serves as the director of graduate studies for the security technologies program and teaches several courses.

His research focuses on two areas: 1) Global transition dynamics to enhance resilience, agility, security and efficiency of complex dynamic systems. These systems include national critical infrastructures for interdependent energy, computer networks, communications, transportation and economic systems; and 2) Strategic scanning, mapping, assessment and valuation to identify new science and technology-based opportunities that meet the needs and aspirations of consumers, organizations, and the broader society.

Prior to joining the University of Minnesota in March 2003, Dr. Amin held positions of increased responsibility including head of Mathematics and Information Sciences and Area Manager of Infrastructure Security, Grid Operations/Planning, Energy Markets, Risk and Policy Assessment at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California.

In the aftermath of the tragic events of 9/11, he directed all security-related research and development at EPRI, including the Infrastructure Security Initiative (ISI) and the Enterprise Information Security (EIS). Prior to October 2001, he served as manager of mathematics and information science at EPRI, where he led strategic research in modeling, simulation, optimization, and adaptive control of national infrastructures for energy, telecommunication, transportation, and finance.

At EPRI, Dr. Amin pioneered R&D into smart grid, coined the term 'self-healing grid' and led the development of more than 24 advanced technologies transferred to the industry.

Dr. Amin serves on several boards including the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment (BICE) at the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (2001-2007), and is a member of the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Applications (BMSA) at the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Amin is the author or co-author of more than 170 research papers and the editor of seven collections of manuscripts, serves on the editorial boards of six academic journals. Please see http://umn.edu/~amin for selected presentations and publications.