AI & Simulation Lab

We demonstrate the Patterns of Life Simulation to create realistic simulations of human mobility in a city. This simulation has recently been used to generate massive amounts of trajectory and check-in data. Our demonstration focuses on using the simulation twofold: (1) using the graphical user interface (GUI), and (2) running the simulation headless by disabling the GUI for faster data generation. We further demonstrate how the Patterns of Life simulation can be used to simulate any region on Earth by using publicly available data from OpenStreetMap. Finally, we also demonstrate recent improvements to the scalability of the simulation allows simulating up to 100,000 individual agents for years of simulation time. During our demonstration, as well as offline using our guides on GitHub, participants will learn: (1) The theories of human behavior driving the Patters of Life simulation, (2) how to simulate to generate massive amounts of synthetic yet realistic trajectory data, (3) running the simulation for a region of interest chosen by participants using OSM data, (4) learn the scalability of the simulation and understand the properties of generated data, and (5) manage thousands of parallel simulation instances running concurrently.

Resilience assessment is crucial for maintaining high availability, security, and quality of service in power grids. However, most current grid research lacks hardware testbed capabilities. Moreover, the integration of distributed energy resources expands the grid’s attack surface, necessitating reliable and realistic modeling techniques to be accessible to the broader research community. Consequently, simulation testbeds have emerged to model real-world power grid topologies and evaluate the impact of various disruptions. Existing co-simulation platforms for power grids focus on limited components, such as focusing only on the dynamics of the physical layer. Additionally, many platforms require specialized hardware that may be too expensive for most researchers. Furthermore, not many platforms support realistic modeling of the communication layer, which demands the use of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) communication protocols like DNP3 for cybersecurity scenario modeling. We introduce Network Attack Testbed in [Power] Grid (NATI[P]G) (pronounced “natig”), a stand-alone, containerized, and reusable environment that enables cyber analysts and researchers to execute various cybersecurity and performance scenarios on power grids. NATIG integrates GridLAB-D, a grid simulator, HELICS, a co-simulation framework, and NS3, a network simulator, to create an end-to-end simulation environment for the power grid. We demonstrate use cases by generating a library of datasets for several scenarios. These datasets can be utilized to detect cyberattacks at the cyber layer and develop countermeasures against these adverse scenarios.