SCyPSCenter for Smart Cyber-Physical Systems, UMass Lowell
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Research thrusts

Resilient energy and infrastructure

What keeps the grid, a reactor, a highway, or a bridge working when the computers and networks that run it are attacked or knocked out, and how does it come back?

Physical infrastructure is now steered by measurements that travel over networks, so the measurement path is an attack surface and a failure point: corrupt what the operator sees and you corrupt what the operator does. This thrust studies the whole loop, from the sensor to the control room and back out to the breaker, the signal, or the valve, across energy, nuclear, transportation, and civil systems.

What the group builds

Seeing the grid under attack

False data injected into smart meters and phasor measurement units is caught before it reaches control, with detectors that work across utilities without pooling raw data, and sensor placement and network topology are designed together so the state estimator still sees the grid after a failure.

Restoring power and communication together

After a storm or an attack the power layer and the communication layer must come back as one problem, including forming networked microgrids on the fly; a crew cannot reconfigure what it cannot observe.

Nuclear energy and security

Safeguards, radiation detection, and the cyber-physical safety of reactor control and protection systems, from the Massachusetts nuclear and fusion roadmap to the IAEA training institute.

Transportation and civil infrastructure

Connected-vehicle systems, railroad and highway safety from sensing and AI, and the structural health of bridges, wind turbines, and water systems, all measured and modeled as cyber-physical systems.

Recent papers

The newest work from the faculty on this thrust. 102 papers since 2019 carry one of their names.

  1. X. Yan, Z. Bhuyan, J. Oke, G. Wu, Y. Xie
    A two-stage detection and segmentation framework for pedestrian crosswalk inventory and condition assessment from aerial imagery
    Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, vol. 182, art. 115851, Oct. 2026IF 7.5 (2023)
  2. A. Moeinaddini, Y. Chen, T. Zhang, Y. Xie, Y. Zou
    Hybrid transformer and large language model framework for lane-level short-term travel time prediction
    Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, vol. 182, art. 115838, Oct. 2026IF 7.5 (2023)
  3. A. Rezaee, F. Arpanaei, R. McCann, H. Rabbani, J. A. Hernández, M. Brandt-Pearce, V. M. Vokkarane
    QoT-Aware Dynamic Resource Allocation and Grooming in Multi-Band Space-Division Multiplexing Networks
    IEEE/Optica Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, vol. 18, no. 10, Oct. 2026IF 5.1 (2025)
  4. A. Rezaee, R. McCann, V. M. Vokkarane
    FUSION: A Unified Benchmarking Framework for Reproducible Optical Network Research
    IEEE/Optica Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, vol. 18, no. 9, pp. D90-D105, Sept. 2026 (Special Issue on Benchmarking in Optical Networks)IF 5.1 (2025)
  5. X. Yan, Y. Xie, Z. Bhuyan, B. Xiang, G. Wu, M. Shirazi
    Merging behavior under varying work zone sign scenarios: A heterogeneity-based analysis
    Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 235, art. 108614, Sept. 2026IF 5.7 (2023)
  6. A. Moeinaddini, T. Zhang, C. D’Agostino, Y. Xie, Y. Zou
    Accounting for under-reporting in wildlife–vehicle collision hotspot identification using copulas and Bayesian model averaging
    Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 233, art. 108583, Aug. 2026IF 5.7 (2023)
  7. A. Rezaee, F. Arpanaei, R. McCann, L. Nadal, J. A. Hernández, V. M. Vokkarane
    QoT-Aware Spectral and Spatial Scaling Trade-offs in Multi-Band Space Division Multiplexing over EONs [Invited]
    IEEE/Optica Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, vol. 18, no. 8, pp. C160-C172, Aug. 2026IF 5.1 (2025)
  8. S. Xu, Y. Chen, Y. Xie, C. Wang
    Quantifying the safety effects of left-turn signal control mode: A heterogeneous causal inference framework
    Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 233, art. 108549, Aug. 2026IF 5.7 (2023)

All publications

Other thrusts

Most projects cut across two or three of them.

Next-generation networks and trusted devicesCyber-physical AIPeople in the loop