As the world marks the third anniversary of the conflict in Ukraine, a team of University of Florida researchers is working to secure vulnerable cyber-physical networks in the war-torn nation.
Rafael Muñoz-Carpena, Ph.D., a distinguished professor with Agricultural and Biological Engineering, is leading the NATO-funded project “Pathways for Infrastructure Resilience in Ukraine.” It is creating advanced methodologies to model, test and improve network robustness against cyber-attacks, geopolitical conflicts and natural disasters.
“We are not cyber-physical engineers in the classical sense,” Muñoz-Carpena said. “We are biological engineers, and we draw from biological systems to analyze behavior, rules and dynamics that we can apply to other systems.”
In this case, the focus is on recovery, not just from human-led cyberattacks but also natural disasters that knock Ukraine’s infrastructure offline.
Using national infrastructure data and artificial intelligence models, the project identifies factors to improve system downtime and recovery, Muñoz-Carpena’s noted. The full initiative is designed to foster international collaborations, train scientists, ensure sustainability and provide stakeholders practical resilience tools.
The focus is shifting from risk into resilience.