“We are not cyber-physical engineers in the classical sense,” Muñoz-Carpena said. “We are biological engineers, and we draw from biological systems to analyze behavior, rules and dynamics that we can apply to other systems.”
In this case, the focus is on recovery, not just from human-led cyberattacks but also natural disasters that knock Ukraine’s infrastructure offline.
Using national infrastructure data and artificial intelligence models, the project identifies factors to improve system downtime and recovery, Muñoz-Carpena’s noted. The full initiative is designed to foster international collaborations, train scientists, ensure sustainability and provide stakeholders practical resilience tools.
The focus is shifting from risk into resilience.
Muñoz-Carpena contends the reason Ukraine has not completely collapsed is because the country moved from vulnerable physical infrastructure to resilient cyber infrastructure to provide essential civil services to the population.
“The resemblance of a working country depends on citizens receiving services of all sorts. Now, you cannot rely on providing those in a physical infrastructure – in buildings – because they’re under attack. They have moved all the services into a digital platform,” Muñoz-Carpena said.
Marriage certificates and car titles are physically safer to obtain online, for example, so the network needs to be robust. And, certainly, the networks host government communications.
“The cyber infrastructure of Ukraine is very advanced,” said team member Ziynet Boz, Ph.D., an ABE assistant professor of Sustainable Food Systems Engineering and co-principal investigator. “They have a lot of cyber infrastructure, so we can actually test all of these concepts in real time while getting their feedback as they live under these conditions as a reality.”
The initial proposal was funded with $300,000 from Early-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER), a division of the National Science Foundation (NSF). EAGER is a funding mechanism that supports early research considered high-risk but potentially viable.
NATO then provided $500,000 for three years for additional development.
“NATO is involved as a funder and also because the partners in the project are NATO members – Turkey, Poland and the United States- in cooperation with Ukraine,” Muñoz-Carpena said.” Additionally, Estonia and Lithuania are part of this effort through the NSF project”.
Thus, countries neighboring Ukraine – those also keeping a close eye on attacks and infrastructure – are actively participating in the initiative. Those countries have a significant stake because they want to have resilience and recovery tools in case such attacks happen to them.
“Lithuania is focused on human response to cyberattacks. They have a very nice program where they do all kinds of evaluation on managers of IT,” Muñoz-Carpena said. “How do people respond to those attacks? What do they consider to be a threat? How do they adapt to the threat?”
Estonia is focusing on how network shocks affect electrical-grid generation, which has been targeted by Russia. In January, for example, Russia launched a missile attack against Ukraine, forcing widespread power outages, according to The Associated Press. To increase their resilience, Estonia and other Baltic nations cut ties to the Russian power grid and linked with EU power earlier this month.
“Then we have Poland, which is an expert on cybersecurity, classical cybersecurity and networks,” Muñoz-Carpena said.
The initiative has a strong foundation in Texas, with Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport — the second-largest airport in the U.S. — serving as a testbed for these systems. Triple-Gator graduate Robert Horton, Ph.D., a co-principal investigator, first explored this approach as a UF graduate student, focusing on resilience stress testing to guide better infrastructure investments at DFW Airport.
“We are providing a case study to demonstrate a metrics-based approach to quantifying the resilience of critical infrastructure,” said Horton, Ph.D. “Our work delves deeper into how repeated shocks affect system functionality over time.”
According to the U.S. Census, the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area is the fastest growing region in the country, introducing new and unpredictable challenges. Horton leveraged this rapid growth as a model for testing resilience-based tools, which could be adapted for Ukrainian infrastructure projects.
“This means developing better tools to quantify how disruptions have historically impacted systems and how we can better prepare for emerging and systemic risks—many of which are inherently unpredictable,” Horton said.
For Ukraine, the team is developing a simulator component that allows researchers to mimic technologies of a working system. They are building models from AI and other approaches, with much help from UF’s supercomputer HiPerGator.
“We are going to try different flavors of modeling and assemble them to try to reproduce signals we can trust in terms of telling us what’s the status of the system,” Muñoz-Carpena said. “And then the response under attack and recovery afterwards also will be part of that simulation.”
In order to strengthen and revive such infrastruture systems, researchers must analyze the recovery.
“When you bounce back, everybody forgets, right? The adaptation phase is even more problematic,” said ABE professor and co-principal investigator Greg Kiker, Ph.D., also the interim chair of ABE. “The Ukrainians have a set of shocks that are done by an adaptive enemy, meaning the fact that you foiled one attack, they might be ready to try something different.”
He likened it to hurricane season. Florida gets battered, infrastructure is damaged, the season ends and we forget about it until the following June.
“You think about what you could do to be more adaptive in the future,” Kiker added, “because it pays into the future a dividend of resilience.”
Why Ukraine?
“It’s a survival issue,” Muñoz-Carpena said. This country has developed an advanced cybernetwork, but the region is under maximum stress. This necessitates enhanced resilience but also provides a fertile testing ground for building and testing resilience tools amid chaos and attacks.
“It gives us opportunities to test ideas to the very end,” he said, “including [system] collapse.”