Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are software and hardware systems that interact with the physical environment. Many CPSs have useful lifetimes measured in decades. This leads to unique concerns regarding security and longevity of software designed for CPSs which are exacerbated by the need for CPSs to adapt to ecosystem changes if theyare to remain functional over extended periods. In particular, the software in long-lifetime CPSs must adapt to unanticipated trends in environmental conditions, aging effects on mechanical systems, and component upgrades and modifications. This paper presents the Toolkit for Evolving Ecosystem Envelopes (TEEE) system created to help address these challenges in CPSs. TEEE is able to detect environmental changes which have caused errors within the CPS without directly sensing the environmental change. TEEE uses dynamic profiling to detect the errors within the CPS, determine the root cause of the error, alert the user, and suggest a possible adaption.

Constructing, maintaining, modifying, and adapting operational procedures for manned space operations is a complex task. The procedure author is required to keep track of state constraints such as the location of personnel, equipment, or tools, and of resources such as oxygen, fuel, or power. They must also keep in mind a set of constraints imposing additional restrictions on these procedures. For operations on the International Space Station (ISS), these constraints may be of several different types, including such things as warnings that must be present for a given type of operation, previous actions that must have been taken, tracking the location of personnel, tools, and equipment, or synchronizing operations by different astronauts.
As part of an ongoing research project funded by NASA, Adventium Labs and TRACLabs have designed and implemented an initial version of the Constraint Checking Editor for Procedure Tracking (ConCEPT) system, a constraint checking system for procedures represented in the Procedure Representation Language (PRL). ConCEPT has been integrated into TRACLabs’ Procedure Integrated Development Environment (PrIDE), so that procedures in PRL can be checked against constraints and modified during the process of procedure authoring. The design of ConCEPT, including the types of constraints considered and the integration into the PrIDE user interface, has been validated in discussions with NASA flight controllers.

ISO 14971, the primary medical device risk management standard focuses on single-manufacturer monolithic devices. However, the trend towards medical systems built from reusable platforms and interoperable components produced by different manufacturers introduces a number of additional risk management challenges. In this paper, we revisit the stages of the ISO 14971 risk management process, identify risk management challenges associated with interoperable medical systems that are not sufficiently addressed in ISO 14971, and we discuss possible process, analysis, and management concepts that may be useful in addressing these challenges.

FUSED is a tool integration framework that supports multiple engineers who are collaborating in the development of a diverse set of engineering models used for multiple purposes in multiple phases of development. FUSED is extensible to support a chosen set of modeling environments; a few examples from our work are requirements, solid geometry, computational fluid dynamics, dynamical systems, and vetronics/avionics. An extensible language approach is used, so that many FUSED capabilities are presented to domain experts as minor additions to familiar languages and tools. There is also a special FUSED language to specify compositions of models. Compositions may be used for multiple purposes, e.g., to specify multiple views of a component, verify inter- model consistency, specify part/whole assemblies, or apply design operations to models. One goal of FUSED is to reduce errors due to inconsistencies and emergent properties that occur across multiple models being developed by multiple domain-specific experts. For example, FUSED has an extensible typing and meta-typing system, and compositions may include powerful model verification environments. Another goal is improved support for concurrent, collaborative, mixed- initiative, evolutionary development processes. For example, FUSED was designed to support dependency tracking, change management and ripple effects analyses, version control and remote model server access, and mixed-initiative and multi- disciplinary collaborative optimization.

The structural and electronic properties of the hydrides of silicene and germanene have been studied using ab initio calculations. The trend for the M–H (M= C, Si, and Ge) bond lengths, and corresponding bond energies, is consistent with the atomic size trend, and comparable to those of MH4 hydrides. Band structures were also obtained for the buckled configuration, which is the stable form for both silicene and germanene. Upon hydrogenation, both silicane (indirect gap) and germanane (direct gap) are semiconducting.

In this paper, we describe a tool-set for managing the configuration and management of large-scale networks. In particular, we focus on managing limited processing and communication resources for coordinated network cyber-defense applications. Our implementation encompasses the complete cycle, from initial network modeling and extraction of the relevant constraints, through translation into a formal constraint model, and finally the application of a Linear Programming solver to determine feasibility. This system has been demonstrated on realistic cyber-defense network models provided by domain experts, as well as on automatically-generated models, used to explore the scaling behavior of the system.

We propose a reference architecture aimed at supporting the safety and security of medical devices. The ISOSCELES (Intrinsically Secure, Open, and Safe Cyber-Physically Enabled, Life-Critical Essential Services) architecture is justified by a collection of design principles that leverage recent advances in software component isolation based on hypervisor and other separation technologies. The instantiation of the architecture for particular medical devices is supported by a development process based on Architecture Analysis and Design Language. The architecture models support safety and security analysis as part of a broader risk management framework. The models also can be used to derive skeletons of the device software and to configure the platform’s separation policies and an extensive set of services. We are developing prototypes of the architecture and example medical device instantiations on low-cost boards that can be used in product solutions. The prototype and supporting development and assurance artifacts are being released under an open-source license.

Time series data has been exploited for use with Case Based Reasoning (CBR) in many applications. We present a novel application of CBR that combines intelligent tutoring using Augmented Reality (AR) and prediction. The MonitAR system, presented in this paper, is intended for use as an intelligent guidance system for astronauts conducting complex procedures during periods of a communication time delay or blackout from Earth. Our approach takes advantage of the relational nature of time-series data to detect a task that the user is completing and diagnose the issue when the user is about to make a mistake.

A communications system is provided that includes a communications scheduler adapted to receive messages from a plurality of message sources and sensors. The messages comprise human and generated messages. The sensors comprise situational, neurophysiological and physiological sensors. The cognitive state profile processing unit receives sensor data and produces a current cognitive state profile for the user. The communications scheduler includes a context manager that receives outputs from the plurality of sensors, monitors a current user’s tasks, and retains information about the user’s environment, a message characterization unit that characterizes the messages using the attributes of the message, outputs from the sensors, and the user’s specific baseline profile data and a presentation unit that receives the characterized messages, the cognitive state profile, and context information and queues the characterized messages into a prioritized message list and presents the message list to the user via the display unit.

While creating a software suite of ontology tools for operations, we encountered several reasoner performance scaling issues. This paper describes the symptoms, the diagnosis, and the mitigation strategies used.