At a minimum, power outages are jarring. In a flash, screens fade to black, lights darken and air conditioners go warm. When the problem is limited to a single street or neighborhood – due to causes such as equipment failure or a line downed by a fallen tree – the local utility can usually fix it within a few hours by sending out a crew. But when an outage affects an entire city – where everything from sewer systems to traffic lights and hospitals are connected to a central grid – complications and even dangers arise that require innovative solutions.
Government officials and researchers are prioritizing the creation of secure and resilient electricity-generation and transmission infrastructure across the country for situations like these, says Assistant Professor M. Hadi Amini, founding director of Sustainability, Optimization and Learning for InterDependent networks laboratory (solid lab) at FIU’s Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences.
Amini leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the College of Engineering and Computing that has received a five-year $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to use machine learning and AI to develop novel solutions for critical infrastructure resilience. The grant also focuses on bolstering cybersecurity to combat hackers who can threaten critical infrastructure via cyberattacks.
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