Research Seminar by Professor David M. Nicol from UIUC, 18th July 2024, at CCDS Meeting Room (N4-02a-35)

Time: 10:30pm-12noon, July 18th Thursday 2024

Venue: CCDS Meeting Room (N4-02a-35)

Title: Models, Data, and Discrete-Event Systems Simulation in the Study of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract:

Discrete-event systems simulation is a foundational tool in the planning, development, evaluation, operation, and maintenance of many different kinds of systems. It has been used for decades in application domains such as manufacturing, chip design, computer systems, communication systems, transportation systems, and many more. In the last two decades it has been coupled with simulators of physical systems to create sophisticated digital twins. In the last two decades I've personnally used it in support of cyber-security analysis of electric power systems, with an increasing emphasis on the role that observational data plays, particularly in the areas of model development and model validation. In this talk I'll describe some of my own experience, speak to broader applications in the realm of industrial cyber-physical systems, and identify open challenges for the methodology that I see in those applications.

Biography:

David M. Nicol holds the Herman M. Dieckamp Endowed Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and is a member of its Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Since 2011 he has served as the Director of the Information Trust Institute (ITI), the focal point for large-scale research projects at UIUC in areas related to the trustworthiness of systems, which include cyber-physical systems, industrial control systems, and most specifically, critical infrastructures such as electrical power, oil and gas, and communications. Nicol develops technologies that assess the trustworthiness of critical infrastructures and assess the risk of those critical infrastructures to accidental and intentionally generated upset events. He brings to these tasks career-long experience in developing means of modeling large-scale systems, and of using high performance parallel computation to evaluate those models. He is co-author of the widely used undergraduate textbook "Discrete-Event Systems Simulation", and is co-founder of the company Network Perception whose products are widely used in the electric industry, particularly for NERC CIP audits. Nicol holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Carleton College, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Virginia. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of the ACM for his research contributions and is the inaugural recipient of the ACM SIGSIM Distinguished Contributions Award.