Grant Details

The goals of the Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) program are to:

1. Foster an interdisciplinary research community of engineers, computer and computational scientists and social and behavioral scientists, that creates new approaches and engineering solutions for the design and operation of infrastructures as processes and services;
2. Enhance the understanding and design of interdependent critical infrastructure systems (ICIs) and processes that provide essential goods and services despite disruptions and failures from any cause, natural, technological, or malicious;
3. Create the knowledge for innovation in ICIs so that they safely, securely, and effectively expand the range of goods and services they enable; and
4. Improve the effectiveness and efficiency with which they deliver existing goods and services.

These goals lead to the following specific objectives for this program:

1. To create new knowledge, approaches, and engineering solutions to increase resilience, performance, and readiness in ICIs.
2. To create theoretical frameworks and multidisciplinary models of ICIs, processes and services, capable of analytical prediction of complex behaviors, in response to system and policy changes.
3. To develop frameworks to understand interdependencies created by the interactions between the physical, the cyber (computing, information, computational, sensing and communication), and social, behavioral and economic elements of ICIs.
4. To study socioeconomic, political, legal and psychological obstacles to improving ICIs and identifying strategies for overcoming those obstacles.

Various research activities in critical resilient infrastructure systems and processes that might be included in proposals are listed below:

• Design and test new scalable, multi -scale, modeling, simulation, real-time control and dynamic adaptation/configuration techniques (including software and software development techniques) to improve the resilience of ICIs;
• Improve control, integrity, and overall stability of services provided by ICIs;
• Understand the "systems ecology" of our interdependent infrastructures and services, including human, physical as well as cyber components;
• Create conceptual frameworks or theories for understanding the processes and services of interdependent infrastructure systems from a multidisciplinary perspective;
• Apply interdisciplinary knowledge to the design and management of interdependent critical infrastructure systems and processes required to meet societal needs;
• Test hypotheses and validate explanatory models through empirical work involving ICIs with either existing or newly collected data;
• Study risk assessment, incentives, network interactions and other mechanisms for facilitating the creation of resilient, efficient ICIs;
• Study socio -economic, political, legal, organizational, technical and psychological obstacles to improving ICIs and identify resources and strategies for overcoming those obstacles;
• Explore the economics and governance of ICIs;
• Explore impact of interactions and interdependencies between cyber and physical systems on correctness, safety and security properties of ICIs;
• Explore new multidisciplinary engineering approaches to increase resilience, interoperability, performance, and readiness in ICIs;
• Expand the design space of alternatives, leveraging new interdependencies to increase resiliency to extreme conditions and future events; and
• Determine the socio -economic value of new interdependencies of ICIs to meet societal demands

Two types of awards are available:

• Type 1 Awards: Theory, modeling, data collection and metric formalizations projects that will create the knowledge, representations, methodologies, case studies and approaches to conceptualize and study interdependent infrastructures as processes, services and systems. These awards are not intended for empirical testing of models or theories.
• Type 2 Awards: These proposals support interdisciplinary research to conduct major new interdependent infrastructure research using empirical data. They are expected to include the creation of knowledge, representations, methodologies and approaches to conceptualize and study interdependent infrastructures as processes, services and systems.