Dr. Kalyan Piratla received a National Science Foundation EAGER Grant. NSF’s EAGER was designed specifically for potentially transformative or exploratory
research that explores new subjects, different methods, or interdisciplinary approaches, the exact kinds of things one would expect in innovative research.
Dr. Piratla recognizes that our critical infrastructures such as water, power, gas, and telecommunications systems are interdependent, warranting the 
use of a system-of-systems approach for understanding the failure cascading dynamics and the need of efficiently managing them. One of the major hurdles in this regard is the lack of real data on critical infrastructure interdependencies. This EAGER grant from the National Science Foundation will support the development of a multi-scale critical infrastructure network generator that can produce ensembles of synthetic data sets representing real critical infrastructure and their interdependencies. The network generator will preserve a diverse set of topological, physical and organizational features of known critical infrastructures and additionally incorporates an arbitrarily large or small degree of stochasticity in producing the much-needed synthetic data.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers will bring perspectives and methodological approaches from network analyses, big data systems, machine learning, water networks, and organizational sciences to support the network generation algorithms and produce data sets for a broad dissemination to the scientific community. The modeling architecture to be developed in this project will broadly impact other domains such as human contact networks to accurately model, for example, the evolution of epidemics. Overall, this project will produce data that is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of inherent interdependencies in our critical infrastructures.
