ARL has identified three interrelated aspects or Research Areas specific to the IoBT CRA
vision that when jointly studied will advance the theoretical foundations of IoBT
phenomena. In addition, advancing the theoretical foundations that impact the challenges
of these three Research Areas (RAs) requires trans-disciplinary research that takes into
account the adversarial and security concerns of the Cyber-Physical IoBT. This Cross-
Cutting Research Issue (CCRI) addressing Cyber-Physical Security must be studied jointly
in the context and constraints of the three identified Research Areas. The three Research
Areas and Cross Cutting Research Issue are defined as follows:
Discovery, Composition and Adaptation of Goal-Driven Heterogeneous
IoBTs: Novel mathematical theories and scientific insights leading to scalable
composition and management of heterogeneous IoBTs enabling secure information
sharing to meet multiple dynamic mission goals.
Autonomic IoBTs to Enable Intelligent Services: Theoretical foundations,
models, and methods of autonomic complex systems that deliver adaptive cyberphysical
capabilities and services necessary to enable effective command and
control across military (blue), adversary (red), and civilian (gray) domains.
Distributed Asynchronous Processing and Analytics of Things: Scientific
principles, theories, and methods and enable predictive processing, analytics, and
anomaly detection of broadly heterogeneous and varied data, that may be unknown
combinations of sparse and voluminous; centralized and distributed; and trusted
and suspect for the purposes of augmenting goal-driven decision-making.
Cyber-Physical Security: Theoretical and pragmatic cross-cutting methods that
address the challenges of the above research areas, while enriching the resiliency
of the IoBT, such that it can be hardened against tampering and adversarial
compromise, continue operating under attacks, and provide bounded guarantees of
performance.