At the World Cities Summit in Singapore, July 31-August 3, 2022, NIST's Michael Dunaway presented the Framework for Key Performance Indicators for Smart Cities and Communities in NIST Special Publication 1900-206. The Framework is a measurement methodology for assessing the direct and indirect benefits of smart city technologies. The methodology enables the integration, adaptability, and extension of three interacting levels of analysis: technologies, infrastructure services, and community benefits. The presentation was part of the Summit's focus on smart cities, sustainable infrastructure, the circular economy, cybersecurity, and digital transformation.
Dunaway was a member of the U.S. delegation, which included representatives from the Department of Commerce's NIST, International Trade Administration (ITA), and U.S. Trade Representatives, in addition to eight other U.S. agencies and the American Chamber of Commerce. The delegation sought to advance the U.S.-Singapore Partnership for Growth and Innovation signed by Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and Singapore Minister for Trade Gan Kim Yong in October 2021. The delegation's activities included supporting the U.S.-Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Smart City Partnership, which involved the following:
Engaging over 30 U.S. businesses and organizations involved in smart city initiatives and technology development in the ASEAN region and seeking ways to expand their efforts
Planning with ASEAN counterparts for a smart cities/communities cybersecurity conference to be held in April 2023 in California as part of the ASEAN Secure Smart Cities Exchange
The authors note that the standard describes how two or more cloud providers could form a federation, allowing data and service sharing over a distributed environment. They also state that the IEEE defined the IEEE 2302-2021 standard based on the NIST Cloud Federation Reference Architecture. And they address federation uses that could produce societal benefits, including:
"Cloud Bursting": This capability would allow a primary cloud to expand capabilities by using an external cloud, like when a private cloud needs a public cloud's resources.
International Disaster Response: Information sharing in and beyond disaster regions could be achieved with federations, where data access is based on authorizations.
Virtual Mission Infrastructures: A federation could enable different organizations working together on a mission to access data needed, based on authorizations.
National Strategic Computing Reserve: This is an initiative being developed by the National Science and Technology Council that will connect compute resources for use in national emergencies.
Federated Analytics: The Confidential Computing Consortium has identified use cases for Trusted Execution Environments in which remote users need analytics and which a federation could enable.
The authors state that several federation-based systems are operational but have limited levels of applications purposes. They further say that the IEEE standard advances a "Federation Hosting Service" model and identifies increased capability levels for building to it:
In July 2022, the National Academies' Transportation Research Board conducted its 11th International Automated Road Transportation Symposium, with Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg as keynote speaker. Two NIST staff members presented ongoing research supporting automated transportation.
NIST's Tao Zhang on Teleoperation Expanding the Solution Space for Automated Driving
NIST's Tao Zhang participated in the breakout session on Remote Assistance and Teleoperation for Automated Vehicle Operations. Zhang addressed how teleoperations could remotely assist automated vehicles, when needs arise. In doing so, Zhang noted teleoperations' challenges, opportunity, the future, and enabling research.
Challenges include:
Enabling the vehicle to remain safe when network performance fluctuates. It means balancing capabilities between those on the automated vehicle and remote teleoperations system, which serves as safety back up. It also means having enough warning time to avoid an unsafe situation.
Determining how many remote vehicles one human teleoperator can handle. Teleoperators may monitor several automated vehicles, but what happens when two or more need human intervention? Such situations must be minimized.
Opportunity: Today, teleoperations are done mostly by humans. But automation and artificial intelligence are being introduced into the teleoperation. That trend is going to continue, as it does, that human burden is going to decrease, and automation is going to increase. The opportunity lies in integrating the teleoperation system with the automated vehicle system such that unsafe situations can be detected in time and teleoperation assistance can be automatically activated.
The Future: Gradually, driving intelligence and functions can be distributed between automated vehicle and teleoperation systems, enabling a broader spectrum of solutions for automated driving. Teleoperations will be an important long-term achievement for automated driving.
Enabling Research: NIST is with working with the Teleoperation Consortium on Teleoperations Guidelines, which will identify challenges, opportunities, and potential areas that could benefit from standardization. The breakout session addressed approaches to developing these guidelines.
NIST’s Ed Griffor on Operating Envelope Specification for Assessing Automated Vehicle Performance
The OES complements industry's Operational Design Domain which describes under what conditions an automated vehicle is designed to operate – roadway infrastructure, traffic, weather and more – and which is used by OEMs and developers to design AVs. “OES goes further,” indicated Griffor, “by providing a framework for measurement of an AV's operating environment, and so supports the specifications of key vehicle behaviors – such as lane following, lane change and navigating intersections.” OES is a critical component of the “science of automated driving,” remarked Griffor. In this way, OES measurements of operating conditions inform both the AV itself and allow the development of testing scenarios and their associated acceptance criteria – like maintaining an acceptable distance from other vehicles and obstacles in and around the roadway.
Griffor further stated that AV behaviors can only be engineered and assessed in relation to the driving environment and that NIST's contribution, on this measurement front of AV behaviors and operating conditions, can support “down the road,” the development of AV and advanced mobility standards.
NIST released its Interagency Report on Advanced Communication Technologies Standards which is a guide for Federal agencies on standards priorities and activities related to communications technologies. The report was developed by the Interagency Advanced Communications Technology Working Group, comprised of 18 Federal agencies, and chartered by the NIST-led Interagency Committee on Standards Policy, which advises federal agencies on standards policy matters.
While the private sector is best positioned to lead on standards, Federal agencies are important adopters and technical contributors in standards development. To be effective in these roles, agencies must:
Coordinate with one another, so as not to duplicate effort or work at cross purposes
Communicate clearly with private sector standards leaders in a unified voice
This report focuses squarely on these two goals. The first portion of the report identifies strategic standards priority areas, including the Internet of Things, security and privacy for communications, quality assurance for critical infrastructure communications, and emerging technologies such as quantum communications. The second portion sets out key Federal agencies' communications standards goals and priorities, identifies focus areas, and provides examples of current standards-related activities. Building on the report’s findings, Federal agencies are now working with industry to identify key standards gaps and opportunities in strategic priority areas.
The report advances standards that promote innovation and next-generation communications that catalyze progress across all sectors of society. When comprehensively adopted communications standards enable connectivity anytime, anywhere, with anyone. This connectivity becomes an infrastructure for innovation – a critical component in bringing technologies from lab to market for a vibrant global economy. Without broad adoption, standards can unduly advantage one sector or nation at others' expense. The United States Standards Strategy focuses on voluntary consensus standards that promote innovation and a level playing field for all in a globally competitive economy.
NIST's Industrial Wireless Systems team, in collaboration with the NIST Innovations in Measurement Science (IMS) project, World’s Best IIoT Test: A High-Precision, 3D, Repeatable Testbed for Industrial Wireless Applications, published “A Machine-Learning Approach for the Exemplar Extraction of mmWave Industrial Wireless Channels” in the IEEE Open Journal of Instrumentation and Measurement.
Many see millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands as crucial to achieving connectivity between system components, in the future Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Compared to sub-6 GHz wireless bands, mmWave bands offer larger bandwidth and higher directivity, with the same aperture size, enabling improved signal strength reception and spectral efficiency. In addition, mmWave bands have different wireless channel characteristics, which allow more spatial diversity and require the mmWave channels to be well studied and modeled.
In the published paper, CTL researchers propose an accurate and computationally efficient way to test and evaluate mmWave IIoT wireless systems. They introduce an exemplar extraction approach for measuring mmWave wireless channels. It uses a machine learning (ML) scheme to measure and group power-delay-profiles with respect to angles of arrival. Each group is represented by a power-delay-profile (PDP) exemplar, based on their spatial characteristics. Hence, researchers can use these exemplars to assess wireless communications equipment's spatial performance and with reduced amounts of data.
This approach can enable labs to evaluate devices in a realistic and repeatable environment, which researchers also demonstrated. To recreate the factory floor's scattering environment – a big challenge – researchers collected mmWave measurements in the highly reflective Central Utility Plant in the Department of Commerce Boulder Laboratories in 2019. The plant has large metal structures – steam pipes, boiler tanks, and equipment control racks – as shown in the picture. To capture spatial channel characteristics, a vector-network, analyzer-based synthetic aperture system is used.
The results show that extracted exemplars better represent measured channels compared to the common procedure of averaging all directional PDPs. The paper's analysis also supports a systematic approach for validating or adjusting communication protocols for dense multi-user scenarios specified in new and emerging wireless standards, such as IEEE 802.11ax (WiFi 6). This approach can help automated factories adjust to industrial environments, which will impact the design of their wireless control links. The approach can also help communication protocols support ultra-reliable data transfers to mitigate safety risks.
Imagine a smart city. Its key systems – electricity, transportation, health care and more – are integrated together to share information and coordinate the services they provide to the community. These systems contain physical things like solar panels, vehicles, and medical devices that interact with both people and computational components like city dashboards and artificial intelligence. This "cyber-physical system" (CPS) is a system-of-systems composed of many applications, platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and more. But the question is, will it all work? That may be difficult to assess because fully prototyping and testing a complex, widely distributed CPS is costly and difficult.
Testing such CPS depends on simulation, but how do you construct a simulation of a complex federation of different systems? Vanderbilt University and NIST researchers address it in Integrating Multiple HLA Federations for Effective Simulation-Based Evaluations of CPS presented at the 2022 IEEE Workshop on Design Automation for CPS and IoT. The researchers argue that integrating multiple simulations, or federates, using a simple High-Level Architecture (HLA) federation will not adequately address real world concerns about CPS. Often, simulating a CPS requires multiple, separate federations – like for a smart city's electricity and transportation systems – with defined communications between them.
The researchers describe situations necessitating use of multiple federations to simulate systems in a CPS. Some organizations may need to limit the exchange of restricted data, thus requiring separate federations with different security permissions. Organizations with differing information technology policies also may need separate federations to control the flow of information into their networks. Additionally, separate federations would be needed to mitigate communication networking issues, when their integration produces significant network traffic, leading to dropped messages and network delays.
The researchers offer ways to develop multiple federations. A federate may be created for sharing a limited resource with other independent federations. Similarly, a federation could share multiple, needed resources with other federations. And hierarchical federations may be created, typical of many organizations and federations may be clustered for widely distributed applications.
Researchers showed the benefits of multiple federations in a use case that models a manufacturing plant, which adjusts outputs based on its products' performance in the market. The use case is aided by NIST's Universal CPS Environment for Federation, which is a software platform for integrating simulations.
Stouffer said NIST worked with the manufacturing sector on industrial control security and the Department of Homeland Security's Industrial Control Systems Joint Working group. This enabled NIST to identify the sector's common business and mission objectives, and subsequently their dependencies on cybersecurity and risks. NIST developed the profile's implementation language aligned with manufacturing sector goals and best practices including:
Ensuring human safety
Safeguarding the environment from deliberate and accidental cybersecurity risks
Protecting product quality, integrity of the manufacturing process, and associated data
Maintaining production goals
Protecting trade secrets, intellectual property, and sensitive business data
Additionally, NIST implemented the profile in its lab and included implementation guidance for off-the-shelf products configured and integrated to meet profile requirements. This additional guidance was provided to address small- and medium-size manufacturers concerns related to meeting profile requirements without negatively impacting operational performance. Feedback received to date shows that this additional guidance to manufacturers has been very helpful.
When asked about sharing information on cybersecurity, Stouffer said one mechanism that NIST uses is the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), which disseminates information to its member organizations and small- and medium-sized businesses. NIST also seeks feedback to further tailor guidance. And NIST personnel regularly provide guidance at conferences.
Stouffer also offered some additional thoughts when asked about suggested improvements to consider with CSF 2.0 including:
Providing guidance on prioritizing security activities and actionable practices to allow small- and medium-sized organizations achieve their business objectives and goals taking into consideration limited resources
Incorporating language relevant for operational technology owners and operators to addresses operational technology objectives for safety, resilience, and operational performance
For additional information, a recording of panel two is freely available online.
