Vision and Goals
The goal of the Priority Programme is to disrupt fundamental limits of connected worlds by adding resilience as a core building block. Resilience describes the ability of a system to either absorb shocks/crises, cope with them by recovering in a timely and efficient manner, or cope with them by attaining comparable or new basic functionality by means of system adaptation, and to sustainably improve by learning from the shock/crisis. Shocks and crises include failures, overload, attacks or completely unexpected events and situations. Machine learning (ML) based solutions help making our complex network infrastructures more resilient, but at the cost of reduced controllability – and with reduced abilities of experts to help in critical situations. Thus, we are faced with even more challenges in terms of resilience in critical network infrastructures.
Resilience, as an emerging research field, is strongly required as a core property of the network infrastructure, from the global internet to the internet of things (IoT), from connected cars to complex cyber-physical systems (CPS); resilience will be a primary research objective for the coming years. Resilient Worlds will provide resilience throughout the complete protocol stack, from the hardware layer to wireless communications to networking to applications. We expect that in modern communication networks, unknown and unforeseen events could be handled both from the network as well as the utilising external capabilities to prevent a collapse of this critical infrastructure. This requires a holistic approach to resilience, leading to appropriate, understandable and easily applicable solutions.
In Resilient Worlds, the focus will be on the investigation of a resilience-by-design approach, which is already very challenging; however, adding resilience to (legacy) systems that were not designed for it can be even more demanding. It is therefore the goal of the Priority Programme to address resilience from a new, multi-disciplinary perspective focusing on communications and networking with links to systems, wireless communications, security and machine learning.