How Safe Is Safe Enough? Ensuring Safety and Resilience in Critical Infrastructure Control Systems

Abstract: Critical infrastructure control systems (CIS), such as energy, transportation, and manufacturing, are expected to operate safely despite uncertain environments, unexpected failures, cyberattacks, and AI-enabled decision-making. Although modern control and verification techniques can provide safety guarantees, these guarantees are only as reliable as the assumptions on which they are built. In this talk, we focus on three questions: (1) How safe is a system when its environment deviates from the assumptions used during design? (2) Can a system recover safe operation after a disruption while continuing to function? (3) How can we leverage emerging AI technologies without sacrificing safety guarantees?

To address these questions, we use supervisory control theory of discrete-event systems to develop new methodologies for robustness analysis of controllers, recovery strategy synthesis, and AI-assisted decision verification. These methodologies enable engineers to characterize safe operating envelopes of controllers, identify realistic vulnerabilities, design controllers that restore safe operation, and formally validate AI-generated plans before deployment. We demonstrate how these methods enhance the safety and resilience of CIS through case studies in manufacturing systems.

Bio: Rômulo Meira-Góes is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Pennsylvania State University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher working with Eunsuk Kang, Stavros Tripakis, and Stéphane Lafortune at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Michigan. In 2022, he received the CPS Rising Stars Award from the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2020, working with Stéphane Lafortune. Prior to the University of Michigan, he earned his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná - Curitiba in 2015.