Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP)

Critical infrastructures are the mainstay of our nation's economy, security and health. These infrastructures are interdependent. For example, the electrical power system depends on the delivery of fuels to power generating stations through transportation services, the production of those fuels depends in turn on the use of electrical power, and those fuels are needed by the transportation services.

The goals of the Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) solicitation are to: (1) foster an interdisciplinary research community of engineers, computer and computational scientists and social and behavioral scientists, that creates new approaches and engineering solutions for the design and operation of infrastructures as processes and services; (2) enhance the understanding and design of interdependent critical infrastructure systems (ICIs) and processes that provide essential goods and services despite disruptions and failures from any cause, natural, technological, or malicious; (3) create the knowledge for innovation in ICIs so that they safely, securely, and effectively expand the range of goods and services they enable; and (4) improve the effectiveness and efficiency with which they deliver existing goods and services. These goals lead to the following specific objectives for this solicitation:

• To create new knowledge, approaches, and engineering solutions to increase resilience, performance, and readiness in ICIs.

• To create theoretical frameworks and multidisciplinary models of ICIs, processes and services, capable of analytical prediction of complex behaviors, in response to system and policy changes.

• To develop frameworks to understand interdependencies created by the interactions between the physical, the cyber (computing, information, computational, sensing and communication), and social, behavioral and economic (SBE) elements of ICIs. These could include, but are not limited to, approaches for: better physical design of ICIs and their placement; the use of new materials; software frameworks for better integration of the software and computing systems embedded in ICIs; software frameworks for modeling and simulation, management, monitoring and control of interdependent ICIs; and novel software engineering methodologies.

• To understand organizational, social, psychological, legal, and economic obstacles to improving ICIs, and identifying strategies for overcoming those obstacles. 

The CRISP solicitation seeks proposals with transformative ideas that will ensure ICI services are effective, efficient, dependable, adaptable, resilient, safe, and secure. Successful proposals are expected to study multiple infrastructures focusing on them as interdependent systems that deliver services, enabling a new interdisciplinary paradigm in infrastructure research. To meet the interdisciplinary criterion, proposals must broadly integrate across engineering, computer, information and computational science, and the social, behavioral and economic (SBE) sciences. Proposals that do not meet this criterion may be returned without review. Projects supported under this solicitation may undertake the collection of new data or use existing curated data depending on the category of award, and must recognize that a primary objective is integrative, predictive modeling that can use the data to validate the models and that can be integrated into decision making.

See Section X, Appendix for frequently asked questions (FAQs).