Partner Institution: European Commission

Project Information: Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI), €3.2 million, 2013.10-2016.12

Project Description: Today’s technical Systems-of-Systems (TSoS), such as traffic, transportation, and energy management systems, require expensive sensor and communication infrastructure with high deployment and operational costs. Additionally, to achieve efficient performance, they require time-consuming and labor-intensive modeling, analysis, and control design processes. In contrast, natural Systems-of-Systems (NSoS), such as the human brain, animal groups (swarms), interactive/cooperative human or animal teams, can achieve efficient, elegant, and excellent functionality without expensive infrastructure because they primarily rely on local information between adjacent systems. Most importantly, they do not require any modeling, analysis, or control design tools to achieve this functionality. If the powerful properties of NSoS could be transferred and embedded into TSoS, this would not only lead to more efficient TSoS operations but, more importantly, would make TSoS design, deployment, and operations significantly simpler, safer, and more economical. This is precisely Local4Global’s main objective: to develop, test, and evaluate a groundbreaking, universal, and fully functional new method/system for controlling TSoS. This system will, like NSoS, optimize TSoS performance at the global level without deploying and operating expensive sensor and communication infrastructure, and most importantly, without using complex and time-consuming modeling, analysis, and control design tools. By embedding properties currently found only in NSoS into TSoS, Local4Global’s ambition is to develop a system that can be embedded in everyday TSoS operations to achieve significant cost savings and service quality improvements with minimal infrastructure and minimal installation/operational investment. The availability of such a system will have enormous economic and social impacts on almost all activities of daily life: for example, driver/traveler commute times will be significantly reduced, building occupants’ energy bills will be substantially lowered, and most importantly, energy consumption and pollution will be dramatically reduced. Furthermore, Local4Global applications will not be limited to fields and systems that currently do not use advanced control due to requiring complex infrastructure, but will also be equally important for fields and systems that have infrastructure but where existing control and management systems are “incompetent.” Local4Global’s progress will produce a fully functional, plug-and-play system (Local4Global final product)—delivered as an embedded, web-based “plug-and-play” universal TSoS software system. This system will be deployed and extensively tested in two real TSoS use cases: a traffic TSoS use case and a building TSoS use case.