Report Title: Human-Cyber-Physical Systems for Resilient Civil Infrastructure Operations in a Changing World
Report Expert: Dr. Pingbo Tang, Associate Professor of Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Date: 8.30-10:30 May 13
Report Summaries:
Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS), such as transportation infrastructure, water supply facilities, nuclear power plants, airports, etc., require effective system-level operation and maintenance (O&M) to ensure the security and efficiency of the systems. Such CIS operation and maintenance processes require a large number of Human factors, including the cognition, decision-making and activities of a person/team, thus forming the Human-Cyber-Physical Systems (H-CPS). In a rapidly changing world, without proper understanding and coordination of human behavior in the H-CPS, the security and efficiency of CIS operations and maintenance will be affected. For example, air traffic controllers may overlook minor deviations in flight plans, which can gradually lead to congestion spread, associated flight changes and cascading delays. A resilient and responsive program that strictly complies with aviation safety regulations is required to detect and solve critical traffic incidents. Therefore, it is of critical importance to understand the cognition and task execution behavior of people in the CIS operation and maintenance process, so as to ensure the safety and efficiency of the process.
This invited academic lecture aims to review the research of H-CPS, including capturing, judging and predicting the impact of human cognition and task performance on the safety and efficiency of CIS operation and maintenance. This report will introduce the mathematical framework used to describe the reliability of various human factors involved in H-CPS for CIS operation and maintenance. Within this mathematical framework, three types of reliability problems and relevant research examples will be comprehensively introduced, namely human-physical (HP) reliability, human-human (HH) reliability and human-cyper (HC) reliability. In addition, the risks associated with poor coordination, communication, and interaction between people in the CIS operations and maintenance process will be addressed, and the gaps in current research will be described, for instance, the lack of a formal method to automatically check people in the loop during CIS operation and maintenance. In the end, this report will conclude with a research roadmap for achieving people-centered and resilient civilian infrastructure operations.
Figure 1 Dr. Pingbo TANG
Brief Introduction to the Report Expert:
Associate Professor Pingbo Tang is an expert in human factors engineering in the field of civil infrastructure operations and security. His research focuses on remote sensing, human factors engineering, and information modeling techniques to support the spatiotemporal collaborative analysis needed to effectively manage construction sites, existing facilities, and civil infrastructure systems. Currently, his research focuses on H-CPS perception and modeling methods to understand the role of human-information-physical systems (H-CPS) in accelerating construction and infrastructure operations such as airport operations, nuclear power plant outage control. Associate professor Tang Pingbo has been awarded the Best Paper Award at several conferences. He was awarded the Recent Alumnus Achievement Award by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Carnegie Mellon University in 2013, the CAREER Award by National Science Foundation in 2015 and the Daniel W. Halpin Award by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2020.