The global energy sector is facing considerable pressure arising from climate change, depletion of fossil fuels and geopolitical issues around the location of remaining fossil fuel reserves. Energy networks are vitally important enablers for the UK energy sector and therefore UK industry and society. Energy networks exist primarily to exploit and facilitate temporal and spatial diversity in energy production and use and to exploit economies of scale where they exist. The pursuit of Net Zero presents many complex interconnected challenges which reach beyond the UK and have huge relevance internationally. These challenges vary considerably from region to region due to historical, geographic, political, economic and cultural reasons. As technology and society changes so do these challenges, and therefore the planning, design and operation of energy networks needs to be revisited and optimised. Electricity systems are facing technical issues of bi-directional power flows, increasing long-distance power flows and a growing contribution from fluctuating and low inertia generation sources. Gas systems require significant innovation to remain relevant in a low carbon future. Heat networks have little energy demand market share, although they have been successfully installed in other northern European countries. Other energy vectors such as Hydrogen or bio-methane show great promise but as yet have no significant share of the market. Faced with these pressures, the modernisation of energy networks technology, processes and governance is a necessity if they are to be fit for the future. Good progress has been made in de-carbonisation in some areas but this has not been fast enough, widespread enough across vectors or sectors and not enough of the innovation is being deployed at scale. Effort is required to accelerate the development, scale up the deployment and increase the impact delivered.

The objective of the proposed collaborative work is to advance the state of the art in the design of secure interconnected public infrastructures. The focus is on Security-by-Design. While security-by-design is not a new concept, the approach proposed here and its context, are and especially so in the context of interconnected public infrastructure. The increasing commoditisation of components for critical infrastructures has led to the widespread use of embedded computers in such systems. These computers are often interconnected using wireless communications or ethernet. This trend has been accelerated by the need for remote maintenance capability and regular upgrades of systems. An undesirable consequence has been that critical infrastructures have become interconnected and interdependent. The result of an attack on one infrastructure may well have cascading effects on others. Understanding such interdependencies and developing new design methodologies to avoid the possibility of cascading security failures is central to this proposal. The objective will be met through the following key steps: (a) modeling based on abstraction from system design for security analysis, (b) impact and response analysis across interconnected infrastructures using the model, and (c) upgrading of the initial design to improve system resilience to cyber attacks. A significant outcome of the above approach will be a software prototype that implements the steps mentioned above and the integration of such tools with state of the art existing design tools. The methodology and the tools developed will be assessed for their effectiveness and practical utility through experiments designed jointly by the research teams from Imperial and SUTD. The experiments will be conducted on state of the art testbeds available at SUTD for power and water. Generalized attack models, in contrast to specific models that exist today, will be used to create objectively designed cyber attacks to assess the resilience of interconnected systems when one or multiple systems are under attack.

Metallic FCC-BCC nanolayers, such as Cu/Nb, have received wide attention due to their extraordinary mechanical properties as well as the unique self-healing capacities due to the interface characteristics. Most recently, the materials have also been shown to exhibit significant and tunable interfacial sliding mechanisms (based on defect structures in the interface). The significant interfacial sliding is all along while maintaining full contact between the layers, and thus one could expect negligible resistance increase upon straining, which would be attractive for stretchable metallic conductor technology. The interfacial sliding has been modeled with some combination of diffusional and displacive mechanisms - the extreme extents of which are afforded by the nanoscale layering in the materials. The exact mechanisms continue to be fully investigated with in situ mechanical testing allowing the direct observation of the interfacial sliding events inside an SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) or on a synchrotron beamline, as well as many other characterization techniques. In this proposal, we aim to harness the unique capacity for atomic reconfigurations in the FCC/BCC nanolayers to enable stretchable metallic conductors. This approach of using atomic reconfigurations (instead of the structural reconfigurations in existing metallic stretchable technologies) is novel and, due to the associated diffusional and displacive mechanisms strictly in the interface (thus maintaining contact all the while), could lead to potentially new, breakthrough metallic stretchable materials - stretchable (and recoverable) without compromising the electrical conductivity upon significant mechanical deformation, as well as upon long operational duration (durability). Stretchable conductors are important part of stretchable electronics, which could lead to many important technologies such as artificial skin, muscle, limb as well as soft robotics and human-machine interfaces. To accomplish the goals of this project, one needs to make work together experts in mechanics, in situ mechanical testing in SEM or on synchrotron beamlines, characterizing crystal and interfacial defects and stretchable technology. The Street Art Nano project brings together these complementary expertise: " Prof. Arief Budiman of Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), in Singapore, has a strong background in fracture mechanics, deformation behaviors and microstructure evolution of novel (nanoscale) materials. " Prof. Olivier Thomas of Aix Marseille Université (AMU) and CNRS (IM2NP UMR 7334), in Marseille, has a strong background on applying X-ray nano-diffraction techniques to understand the mechanics and defect structures of nanoscale materials. " Prof. Pooi-See Lee of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), in Singapore, has a strong background in novel stretchable materials and technology, and especially in enabling metallic stretchable conductors technology.

In the last few years we have seen unprecedented advances in quantum information technologies. Already quantum key distribution systems are available commercially. In the near future we will see waves of new quantum devices, offering unparalleled benefits for security, communication, computation and sensing. A key question to the success of this technology is their verification and validation. Quantum technologies encounter an acute verification and validation problem: On one hand, since classical computations cannot scale-up to the computational power of quantum mechanics, verifying the correctness of a quantum-mediated computation is challenging. On the other hand, the underlying quantum structure resists classical certification analysis. Members of our consortium have shown, as a proof-of-principle, that one can bootstrap a small quantum device to test a larger one. The aim of VanQuTe is to adapt our generic techniques to the specific applications and constraints of photonic systems being developed within our consortium. Our ultimate goal is to develop techniques to unambiguously verify the presence of a quantum advantage in near future quantum technologies. We will develop experimental test beds and the theoretical framework for verification of diverse quantum technologies including sub-universal quantum computation (boson sampling and instantaneous quantum computation (IQP)), secure quantum communication and quantum sensing and imaging. We will use a three-layered approach to target the development and demonstration of quantum advantage for emerging near future quantum devices. In the core Verification layer we address the key challenge of certifying and verifying quantum information processing beyond the classical regime. This will provide us a crucial interface between our target Applications layer (secure communication, sensing and sub-universal quantum computation) and Implementations layer (photonics hardware). This ambitious project will call on expertise stretching across two groups in France (LIP6 and LORIA) and three in Singapore (SUTD, NUS, NTU), building on a strong history of collaboration. Indeed our French and Singaporean members together pioneered the verification methods we will be adapting and applying across our proposal. The consortium complements this with the expertise required in communication theory, foundational physics, quantum protocols and optical implementations. This project will inevitably forge stronger relations between Singapore and France in this exciting domain and more broadly as the work is disseminated through public engagement and outreach. The ability to communicate securely and compute efficiently is ever more important to society. Our approach to development of verifiable quantum hardware within our experimental testbeds will eventually be complemented with development of real-world applications geared towards industrial involvement.

We all critically depend on and use digital systems that sense and control physical processes and environments. Electricity, gas, water, and other utilities require the continuous operation of both national and local infrastructures to deliver their services. Industrial processes, for example for chemical manufacturing, production of materials such as cement, steel, aluminium or fertilizers, and manufacturing chains for car production or pharmaceuticals similarly lie at this intersection of the digital and the physical. This intersection also applies in other CPS such as robots, autonomous cars, and drones. All such systems are exposed to malicious threats and have been the target of cyber-attacks by different threat actors ranging from disgruntled employees to hacktivists, terrorists, organised crime and nation states. The increasing fragility and vulnerability of our cyber-enabled society is rapidly approaching intolerable limits. As these systems become larger and more complex interruption of service in any of these infrastructures can cause significant cascading effects with safety, economic and societal impacts. Because we critically depend on the operation of such systems, disruption to their operations must be minimised even when they are under attack and have been partially compromised. Because they operate in a physical environment, the safety of such systems must be preserved at all times to avoid physical damage and even threat to life. Therefore, ensuring the resilience of such systems, their survivability and continued operation when exposed to malicious threats requires the integration of methods and processes from security analysis, safety analysis, system design and operation that have traditionally been done separately and that each involve specialist skills and a significant amount of human effort. This is not only costly, but also error prone and delays response to security events. The full integration and automation of such methodologies will be a challenge for many years to come. However, RESICS aims to significantly advance the state-of-the-art and deliver novel contributions that facilitate: a) risk analysis for such systems in the face of adversarial threats taking into account the impact of security events across the cascading inter-dependencies; b) characterising attacks that can have an impact on the safety of the system, identifying the paths that make such attacks possible; c) identifying countermeasures that can be applied to mitigate threats and contain the impact of attacks; and d) ensuring that such countermeasures can be applied whilst preserving the system's safety and operational constraints and maximising its availability. These contributions will be evaluated across several test beds, digital twins, a cyber range and a number of use-cases across different industry sectors. They will deliver increased automation, lower the skill requirements involved in the analysis and in mitigating threats and improve response times to security incidents. To achieve these goals RESICS will combine model-driven and empirical approaches across both security and safety analysis, adopting a systems-thinking approach which emphasises Security, Safety and Resilience as emerging properties of the system. RESICS leverages preliminary results in the integration of safety and security methodologies with the application of formal methods and the combination of model-based and empirical approaches to the analysis of inter-dependencies in ICSs and CPSs.