Workshop Program

As the electric grid evolves into a complex cyber-physical-human system, the seamless integration of Information Technology (IT), Operational Technology (OT), and Internet of Things (IoT) services has become critical to ensure grid resilience, security, and flexibility. Middleware technologies form the digital fabric that interweaves these layers, enabling real-time coordination, situational awareness, and distributed intelligence across the grid ecosystem.

This talk explores how middleware and IoT-enabled services can enhance cyber-power grid resilience through scalable communication, computing, and control architectures. Requirements for centralized, distributed, and decentralized control architectures will be discussed, highlighting their implications for communication, computing, reliability, and system autonomy.

Key topics include: (a) resilience-aware control architecture; (b) example middleware including RIAPS, DCBlocks, and GridStat, including fog and edge computing for distributed, time-sensitive control and fault-tolerant coordination; (c) digital twins with IT/OT for validating control strategies and assessing resilience under cyber-physical stressors; and (d) human-in-the-loop frameworks that couple operator cognition with adaptive, data-driven decision support.

The presentation will highlight how a digitally woven, middleware-enabled fabric linking IoT, IT, and OT with metrics can transform the power grid into a flexible and resilient infrastructure.

Anurag K. Srivastava holds the Raymond J. Lane Professorship and serves as Chairperson of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at West Virginia University. He is also an adjunct professor at Washington State University and a senior scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Dr. Srivastava's research focuses on data-driven algorithms and tools for cyber-resilient electric energy systems. His projects have led to operational tools deployed in utility control centers and have been supported by over $66M in funding from agencies including the U.S. Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, Siemens, Electric Power Research Institute, and other national and international partners.

Increasingly, there is a need to run traditional IT applications on OT equipment. This poses challenges: the cost of porting applications to non-traditional operating systems on OT and embedded devices, the security implications of allowing network access to OT equipment, and the requirements to keep manufacturing equipment patched with the latest updates. WebAssembly, originally developed for the Web, offers solutions to many of these issues.

In this presentation, Chris will outline how WebAssembly works and present examples of how it can address these challenges in IT/OT integration.

Chris Woods is a Senior Key Expert at Siemens, where he has been leading Siemens' WebAssembly engagement. He is a leading proponent of WebAssembly's use in embedded systems, a founding member of the WebAssembly Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University, and founder and co-chair of the WASI Embedded Special Interest Group.

Chris presents regularly on WebAssembly and represents Siemens on WebAssembly at the W3C. He is also a contributor to the WebAssembly Micro Runtime.