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Arunabha Sen

Publications and source records attributed to Arunabha Sen.

35 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

A New Model to Analyze Power and Communication System Intra-and-Inter Dependencies

The reliable and resilient operation of the smart grid necessitates a clear understanding of the intra-and-inter dependencies of its power and communication systems. This understanding can only be achieved by accurately depicting the interactions between the different components of these two systems. This paper presents a model, called modified implicative interdependency model (MIIM), for capturing these interactions. Data obtained from a power utility in the U.S. Southwest is used to ensure the validity of the model. The performance of the model for a specific power system application namely, state estimation, is demonstrated using the IEEE 118-bus system. The results indicate that the proposed model is more accurate than its predecessor, the implicative interdependency model (IIM) [1], in predicting the system state in case of failures in the power and/or communication systems.

cs.NI↗

Predicting Future Opioid Incidences Today

According to the Center of Disease Control (CDC), the Opioid epidemic has claimed more than 72,000 lives in the US in 2017 alone. In spite of various efforts at the local, state and federal level, the impact of the epidemic is becoming progressively worse, as evidenced by the fact that the number of Opioid related deaths increased by 12.5\% between 2016 and 2017. Predictive analytics can play an important role in combating the epidemic by providing decision making tools to stakeholders at multiple levels - from health care professionals to policy makers to first responders. Generating Opioid incidence heat maps from past data, aid these stakeholders to visualize the profound impact of the Opioid epidemic. Such post-fact creation of the heat map provides only retrospective information, and as a result, may not be as useful for preventive action in the current or future time-frames. In this paper, we present a novel deep neural architecture, which learns subtle spatio-temporal variations in Opioid incidences data and accurately predicts future heat maps. We evaluated the efficacy of our model on two open source datasets- (i) The Cincinnati Heroin Overdose dataset, and (ii) Connecticut Drug Related Death Dataset.

cs.CV↗

A Novel Graph Analytic Approach to Monitor Terrorist Networks

Terrorist attacks all across the world have become a major source of concern for almost all national governments. The United States Department of State's Bureau of Counter-Terrorism, maintains a list of 66 terrorist organizations spanning the entire world. Actively monitoring a large number of organizations and their members, require considerable amounts of resources on the part of law enforcement agencies. Oftentimes, the law enforcement agencies do not have adequate resources to monitor these organizations and their members effectively. On multiple incidences of terrorist attacks in recent times across Europe, it has been observed that the perpetrators of the attack were in the suspect databases of the law enforcement authorities, but weren't under active surveillance at the time of the attack, due to resource limitations on the part of the authorities. As the suspect databases in various countries are very large, and it takes significant amount of technical and human resources to monitor a suspect in the database, monitoring all the suspects in the database may be an impossible task. In this paper, we propose a novel terror network monitoring approach that will significantly reduce the resource requirement of law enforcement authorities, but still provide the capability of uniquely identifying a suspect in case the suspect becomes active in planning a terrorist attack. The approach relies on the assumption that, when an individual becomes active in planning a terrorist attack, his/her friends/associates will have some inkling of the individuals plan. Accordingly, even if the individual is not under active surveillance by the authorities, but the individual's friends/associates are, then the individual planning the attack can be uniquely identified. We apply our techniques on various real-world terror network datasets and show the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.SI↗

Health Monitoring of Critical Power System Equipments using Identifying Codes

High voltage power transformers are one of the most critical equipments in the electric power grid. A sudden failure of a power transformer can significantly disrupt bulk power delivery. Before a transformer reaches its critical failure state, there are indicators which, if monitored periodically, can alert an operator that the transformer is heading towards a failure. One of the indicators is the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the voltage and current signals in substations located in the vicinity of the transformer. During normal operations, the width of the SNR band is small. However, when the transformer heads towards a failure, the widths of the bands increase, reaching their maximum just before the failure actually occurs. This change in width of the SNR can be observed by sensors, such as phasor measurement units (PMUs) located nearby. Identifying Code is a mathematical tool that enables one to uniquely identify one or more {\em objects of interest}, by generating a unique signature corresponding to those objects, which can then be detected by a sensor. In this paper, we first describe how Identifying Code can be utilized for detecting failure of power transformers. Then, we apply this technique to determine the fewest number of sensors needed to uniquely identify failing transformers in different test systems.

eess.SP↗

Insights from Statistical Analysis of Opioid Data

Opioid overdose has emerged as a full blown epidemic in the United States. In the last few years, there has been an alarming increase in Opioid related deaths, resulting in the loss of 63,600 lives in 2016 alone. The epidemic which is killing more than 100 people each day, was declared as a public health emergency by the US government, in October 2017. Although a few health related companies and commercial firms have examined this important issue from various available data sources, to the best of our knowledge, the academic community has not been engaged in research in this important topic. It can be safely noted that the study of the epidemic, from the data analytics perspective, is in its infancy. Given that a significant amount of Opioid related data is available in public domain, it provides the academic community an opportunity to analyze such data to provide recommendations to the public health authorities to mitigate the impact of the epidemic. In that vein, we collected some publicly available data to analyze the important contributing factors of the epidemic. In particular, we examine the role of the individuals prescribing Opioid drugs on the spread of the epidemic. In addition, we examine the impact of income level, age and educational level of various neighborhoods in a large US city, on Opioid related incidences, to find any correlation between them.

cs.CY↗

User Satisfaction-Driven Bandwidth Allocation for Image Transmission in a Crowded Environment

A major portion of postings on social networking sites constitute high quality digital images and videos. These images and videos require a fairly large amount of bandwidth during transmission. Accordingly, high quality image and video postings become a challenge for the network service provider, especially in a crowded environment where bandwidth is in high demand. In this paper we present a user satisfaction driven bandwidth allocation scheme for image transmission in such environments. In an image, there are always objects that stand out more than others. The reason behind some set of objects being more important in a scene is based on a number of visual, as well as, cognitive factors. Being motivated by the fact that user satisfaction is more dependent on the quality of these salient objects in an image than non-salient ones, we propose a quantifiable metric for measuring user-satisfiability (based on image quality and delay of transmission). The bandwidth allocation technique proposed thereafter, ensures that this user-satisfiability is maximized. Unlike the existing approaches that utilize some fixed set of non-linear functions for framing the user-satisfiability index, our metric is modelled over customer survey data, where the unknown parameters are trained with machine learning methods.

cs.MM↗

On Hardening Problems in Critical Infrastructure Systems

The power and communication networks are highly interdependent and form a part of the critical infrastructure of a country. Similarly, dependencies exist within the networks itself. It is essential to have a model which captures these dependencies precisely. Previous research has proposed certain models but these models have certain limitations. The limitations of the aforementioned models have been overcome by the Implicative Interdependency Model, which uses Boolean Logic to denote the dependencies. This paper formulates the Entity Hardening problem and the Targeted Entity Hardening problem using the Implicative Interdependency Model. The Entity Hardening problem describes a situation where an operator, with a limited budget, must decide which entities to harden, which in turn would minimize the damage, provided a set of entities fail initially. The Targeted Entity Hardening problem is a restricted version of the Entity Hardening problem. This problem presents a scenario where, the protection of certain entities is of higher priority. If these entities were to be nonfunctional, the economic and societal damage would be higher when compared to other entities being nonfunctional. It has been shown that both problems are NP-Complete. An Integer Linear Program (ILP) has been devised to find the optimal solution. A heuristic has been described whose accuracy is found by comparing its performance with the optimal solution using real-world and simulated data.

cs.NI↗

Finding $K$ Contingency List in Power Networks using a New Model of Dependency

Smart grid systems are composed of power and communication network components. The components in either network exhibit complex dependencies on components in its own as well as the other network to drive their functionality. Existing, models fail to capture these complex dependencies. In this paper, we restrict to the dependencies in the power network and propose the Multi-scale Implicative Interdependency Relation (MIIR) model that address the existing limitations. A formal description of the model along with its working dynamics and a brief validation with respect to the 2011 Southwest blackout are provided. Utilizing the MIIR model, the $K$ Contingency List problem is proposed. For a given time instant, the problem solves for a set of $K$ entities in a power network which when failed at that time instant would cause the maximum number of entities to fail eventually. Owing to the problem being NP-complete we devised a Mixed Integer Program (MIP) to obtain the optimal solution and a polynomial time sub-optimal heuristic. The efficacy of the heuristic with respect to the MIP is compared by using different bus system data. In general, the heuristic is shown to provide near optimal solution at a much faster time than the MIP.

eess.SY↗

A Survey of Interdependency Models for Critical Infrastructure Networks

The critical infrastructures of the nation such as the power grid and the communication network are highly interdependent. Also, it has been observed that there exists complex interdependent relationships between individual entities of the power grid and the communication network that further obfuscates the analysis, and mitigation of faults in such multi-layered networks. In recent years, the research community has made significant efforts towards gaining insight and understanding of the interdependency relations in such multi-layered networks, and accordingly, a number of models have been proposed and analyzed towards realizing this goal. In this chapter we study existing interdependency models proposed in the recent literature and discuss their approach, and inherent features, towards modeling interdependent multi-layer networks. We also provide a brief discussion into the drawbacks of each of these models and propose an alternate model that addresses these drawbacks by capturing the interdependency relationships using a combination of conjunctive and disjunctive relations.

physics.soc-ph↗

Analysis of d-Hop Dominating Set Problem for Directed Graph with Indegree Bounded by One

Efficient communication between nodes in ad-hoc networks can be established through repeated cluster formations with designated \textit{cluster-heads}. In this context minimum d-hop dominating set problem was introduced for cluster formation in ad-hoc networks and is proved to be NP-complete. Hence, an exact solution to this problem for certain subclass of graphs (representing an ad-hoc network) can be beneficial. In this short paper we perform computational complexity analysis of minimum d-hop dominating set problem for directed graphs with in-degree bounded by $1$. The optimum solution of the problem can be found polynomially by exploiting certain properties of the graph under consideration. For a digraph $G_{D}=(V_D,E_D)$ an $\mathcal{O}(|V_D|^2)$ solution is provided to the problem.

cs.DS↗

On Robustness in Multilayer Interdependent Network

Critical Infrastructures like power and communication networks are highly interdependent on each other for their full functionality. Many significant research have been pursued to model the interdependency and failure analysis of these interdependent networks. However, most of these models fail to capture the complex interdependencies that might actually exist between the infrastructures. The \emph{Implicative Interdependency Model} that utilizes Boolean Logic to capture complex interdependencies was recently proposed which overcome the limitations of the existing models. A number of problems were studies based on this model. In this paper we study the \textit{Robustness} problem in Interdependent Power and Communication Network. The robustness is defined with respect to two parameters $K \in I^{+} \cup \{0\}$ and $ρ\in (0,1]$. We utilized the \emph{Implicative Interdependency Model} model to capture the complex interdependency between the two networks. The model classifies the interdependency relations into four cases. Computational complexity of the problem is analyzed for each of these cases. A polynomial time algorithm is designed for the first case that outputs the optimal solution. All the other cases are proved to be NP-complete. An in-approximability bound is provided for the third case. For the general case we formulate an Integer Linear Program to get the optimal solution and a polynomial time heuristic. The applicability of the heuristic is evaluated using power and communication network data of Maricopa County, Arizona. The experimental results showed that the heuristic almost always produced near optimal value of parameter $K$ for $ρ< 0.42$.

cs.NI↗

On Auxiliary Entity Allocation Problem in Multi-layered Interdependent Critical Infrastructures

Operation of critical infrastructures are highly interdependent on each other. Such dependencies causes failure in these infrastructures to cascade on an initial failure event. Owing to this vulnerability it is imperative to incorporate efficient strategies for their protection. Modifying dependencies by adding additional dependency implications using entities (termed as \emph{auxiliary entities}) is shown to mitigate this issue to a certain extent. With this finding, in this article we introduce the Auxiliary Entity Allocation problem. The objective is to maximize protection in Power and Communication infrastructures using a budget in number of dependency modifications using the auxiliary entities. The problem is proved to be NP-complete in general case. We provide an optimal solution using Integer Linear program and a heuristic for a restricted case. The efficacy of heuristic with respect to the optimal is judged through experimentation using real world data sets with heuristic deviating $6.75 \%$ from optimal on average.

cs.NI↗

On the Entity Hardening Problem in Multi-layered Interdependent Networks

The power grid and the communication network are highly interdependent on each other for their well being. In recent times the research community has shown significant interest in modeling such interdependent networks and studying the impact of failures on these networks. Although a number of models have been proposed, many of them are simplistic in nature and fail to capture the complex interdependencies that exist between the entities of these networks. To overcome the limitations, recently an Implicative Interdependency Model that utilizes Boolean Logic, was proposed and a number of problems were studied. In this paper we study the entity hardening problem, where by entity hardening we imply the ability of the network operator to ensure that an adversary (be it Nature or human) cannot take a network entity from operative to inoperative state. Given that the network operator with a limited budget can only harden k entities, the goal of the entity hardening problem is to identify the set of k entities whose hardening will ensure maximum benefit for the operator, i.e. maximally reduce the ability of the adversary to degrade the network. We show that the problem is solvable in polynomial time for some cases, whereas for others it is NP-complete. We provide the optimal solution using ILP, and propose a heuristic approach to solve the problem. We evaluate the efficacy of our heuristic using power and communication network data of Maricopa County, Arizona. The experiments show that our heuristic almost always produces near optimal results.

cs.NI↗

On Connectivity of Airborne Networks

Mobility pattern of nodes in a mobile network has significant impact on the connectivity properties of the network. One such mobile network that has drawn attention of researchers in the past few years is the Airborne Networks (AN) due to its importance in civil and military purpose and due to the several complex issues in these domains. Since the nodes in an airborne network (AN) are heterogeneous and mobile, the design of a reliable and robust AN is highly complex and challenging. In this paper a persistent backbone based architecture for an AN has been considered where a set of airborne networking platforms (ANPs - aircrafts, UAVs and satellites) form the backbone of the AN. End to end connectivity of the backbone nodes is crucial in providing the communication among the hosts. Since ANPs are prone to failure because of attacks like EMP attack or jamming, another important issue is to improve the robustness of the backbone network against these attacks. Such attacks will impact specific geographic regions at specific times and if an ANP is within the fault region during the time of attack, it will fail. This paper focuses on connectivity and fault-tolerance issues in ANs and studies algorithms to compute the minimum transmission range of ANPs in fault free and faulty scenarios to ensure network connectivity all the times. It also considers the scenario where the network may have to operate in a disconnected mode for some part of time and data transmissions may be tolerant to some amount of delay. Hence, ANPs may not need to have end-to-end paths all the time but they should be able to transmit data to each other within bounded time.

cs.NI↗

Identification of $\cal K$ Most Vulnerable Nodes in Multi-layered Network Using a New Model of Interdependency

The critical infrastructures of the nation including the power grid and the communication network are highly interdependent. Recognizing the need for a deeper understanding of the interdependency in a multi-layered network, significant efforts have been made by the research community in the last few years to achieve this goal. Accordingly a number of models have been proposed and analyzed. Unfortunately, most of the models are over simplified and, as such, they fail to capture the complex interdependency that exists between entities of the power grid and the communication networks involving a combination of conjunctive and disjunctive relations. To overcome the limitations of existing models, we propose a new model that is able to capture such complex interdependency relations. Utilizing this model, we provide techniques to identify the $\cal K$ most vulnerable nodes of an interdependent network. We show that the problem can be solved in polynomial time in some special cases, whereas for some others, the problem is NP-complete. We establish that this problem is equivalent to computation of a {\em fixed point} of a multilayered network system and we provide a technique for its computation utilizing Integer Linear Programming. Finally, we evaluate the efficacy of our technique using real data collected from the power grid and the communication network that span the Maricopa County of Arizona.

cs.NI↗

Architecture and Algorithms for an Airborne Network

The U.S. Air Force currently is in the process of developing an Airborne Network (AN) to provide support to its combat aircrafts on a mission. The reliability needed for continuous operation of an AN is difficult to achieve through completely infrastructure-less mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper we first propose an architecture for an AN where airborne networking platforms (ANPs - aircrafts, UAVs and satellites) form the backbone of the AN. In this architecture, the ANPs can be viewed as mobile base stations and the combat aircrafts on a mission as mobile clients. The combat aircrafts on a mission move through a space called air corridor. The goal of the AN design is to form a backbone network with the ANPs with two properties: (i) the backbone network remains connected at all times, even though the topology of the network changes with the movement of the ANPs, and (ii) the entire 3D space of the air corridor is under radio coverage at all times by the continuously moving ANPs. In addition to proposing an architecture for an AN, the contributions of the paper include, development of an algorithm that finds the velocity and transmission range of the ANPs so that the dynamically changing backbone network remains connected at all times, development of a routing algorithm that ensures a connection between the source-destination node pair with the fewest number of path switching, given the dimensions of the air corridor and the radius of the coverage sphere associated with an ANP, development of an algorithm that finds the fewest number of ANPs required to provide complete coverage of the air corridor at all times, development of an algorithm that provides connected-coverage to the air corridor at all times, and development of a visualization tool that depicts the movement patterns of the ANPs and the resulting dynamic graph and the coverage volume of the backbone network.

cs.NI↗