Workshop on Open Resilient
human-aware Cyber-physical Systems
(WORCS-2012)

Program 

Monday June 25, 2012  —   Boston, Massachusetts, USA

in conjunction with the 42nd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on
Dependable Systems and Networks - DSN-2012

Motivation and Objectives

Cyber-physical systems are tight integrations of computation, networking, and physical objects. Advances recently witnessed in pervasive and ubiquitous information processing, driven by major breakthroughs in cyber-physical technology are paving the way towards a more hospitable and sustainable future via a more efficient management of our environment: homes, work places, open areas, etc. Examples of relevant scenarios include: robot-assisted communication and cooperation in search and rescue missions, enhanced and friendly situation awareness in public urban spaces, assistance or monitoring in everyday life for elderly or handicapped people, smart resilient and secure heterogeneous energy grids, future transportation systems featuring intensive sensing and open data communication devices, etc.
It is envisioned that the requirements of the cyber-physical systems (CPS) of the future will far exceed those of todays systems in terms of functionality, usability, adaptability, autonomy, timeliness and resilience to accidental and malicious threats as well as to dynamic changes of user behaviors and of the environment. For this to become a reality, many advances have still to be made to tackle several scientific challenges, among which we can list the followings:

• The need for multidisciplinary approaches integrating technological concerns including physical system dynamics and ICT aspects (covering topics such as sensor technologies, communication and networking, optimization, control and decision making algorithms, resilience and quality of service enforcement and assessment), but also social, legal and user-privacy aspects related to human-physical system interaction, usability, responsibility and user and social acceptability.
• The need for human-aware self-adapting approaches to autonomously, at least reactively and as much as possible proactively, adapt the provided behavior to dynamic changes in the system behavior, environment or threats.
• The need for an integration of design & assessment activities to build the optimal architectures and configurations able to provide the best tradeoffs between functional requirements and non functional requirements (reliability, availability, security, timeliness, performance, etc.)

The aim of this workshop is to set up in the framework of DSN a forum for researchers and practitioners, to address these challenges and to report on recent advances related to the dependability and security of human-aware CPS.

Scope and Topics

This workshop is aimed at exploring the challenges and innovative solutions related to the resilience of human-aware CPS, considering: i) the design of advanced protection mechanisms to cope with malicious attacks, accidental faults, design errors and unexpected or inappropriate interactions with humans and the environment; and ii) the development of rigorous approaches to support the resilience and performance assessment of human-aware CPS. The main issue is to build systems with human-aware and optimized resilience capabilities to prevent, detect and/or recover from the occurrence of such threats, and also to diagnose the root causes of observed misbehaviors. Contributions addressing these topics at different levels of the CPS (sensors, communication network, operating system and middleware levels, up to the system and human levels) are solicited, including:

• Dynamically adaptable and reconfigurable context-aware dependability and security protection mechanisms at sensor, networking,  middleware and system levels.
• Hybrid distributed control and resilience monitoring approaches accounting for the interaction between the cyber and physical components.
• Model-based, simulation and experimental techniques to support the validation and quantitative assessment of the resilience and real-time properties resulting from the integration of cyber and physical resources.
• Resilient human cyber-physical system collaboration, including social and user privacy related concerns.

Contributions addressing conceptual foundations or reporting on practical experiences and real systems are sought. Various application domains could be concerned: healthcare & homecare, digital public spaces, search and rescue, smart power grids, transportation systems, etc.

Participation, Submission and Selection Process

The Workshop is open to researchers, system developers and users,  from both industry and academia, who are involved with or have an interest  in dependability and security of human-aware CPS. The Workshop program will feature both invited and submitted contributions.
All prospective contributors should submit an extended abstract, work-in-progress report or position paper. Submissions must be original work with no substantial overlap with previously published papers or simultaneous submissions to a journal or conference with proceedings. The submissions should conform to the IEEE Computer Society two-column camera-ready format and should not exceed six pages (including all text, figures, references, and appendices). They should explain the contribution to the field and the novelty of the work, making clear the current status of the work. Each submission should start with a title, names and contact information of the authors, as well as a short abstract.

Submissions must be made electronically, as a single Portable Document Format (PDF) file, via the Submission and Evaluation link at: https://www.softconf.com/c/worcs2012/. We recommend that you embed fonts whenever possible to improve portability. We also strongly recommend you print the file and review it for integrity (fonts, symbols, equations, etc.) before submitting it.