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Dear Colleagues:

I would like to draw to your attention a new interdisciplinary workshop that I believe can be a great help to the power community. ToSG (see below) is being held in conjunction with DSN, which is the #1 international conference in dependable computing (in the broad sense of the term). DSN's legacy goes back to its predecessor, FTCS, which started in 1971 in no small part to help the US space program.

Here is some interdisciplinary context: in many computer science (and computer engineering) areas, especially the more applied ones, a top-notch conference is a more prestigious publication venue than a top journal (though later longer journal papers come, way more than the 6-8 page journal limits in power). They are also much more selective: DSN and similar conferences have acceptance rates of 20% or lower. They are also rigorously reviewed and authors given detailed feedback.

As someone whose core background before WSU is in the DSN community, but who has been working very closely with WSU's top-5 power program for 15 years now, I think that only a fraction of the dependable computing techniques built up over the last 40+ years have to date been applied in power grids. I am thus very excited for the potential of ToSG to help facilitate major advances using these techniques. I thus strongly encourage power researchers to check out this workshop. Please note in particular that, besides normal research papers, a category of paper "Experience Studies" is meant for power researchers to help describe and partially analyze dependability issues (power, ICT, and hopefully both) that face power grids today. If power researchers or engineers wish to pursue such a paper and would like to be teamed with someone with an ICT background from the DSN community (hopefully near them) they should contact me and I will work with the other organizers and PC members to try to find a match.

Those of you from the power community who don't get a paper in but would like to learn more, and meet potential collaborators in the DSN community, should try hard to come to the workshop. Atlanta is very easy to get to from just about anywhere!

Best Regards,
Dave Bakken, ToSG lead organizer
Washington State University

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Call for Papers - Submissions due March 14, 2014

The 1st International Workshop on Trustworthiness of Smart Grids (ToSG 2014)
Atlanta, Georgia, USA June 23, 2014
www.tosg-workshop.org

in conjunction with DSN 2014:

The 44th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks
www.dsn.org

Large power grids are extremely complex systems. Dealing with highly dynamic phenomena in protection and control, algorithms require long-distance, high-volume and highly reliable data communications. However, it is widely agreed that electric grids are getting increasingly stressed each year due to surging demand and inadequate transmission growth. At the same time, the centralized generation model is increasingly being extended by the distributed producer-consumer Smart Grid model that adds even more demands on communication (both for control and pricing reasons) and trustworthiness (dependability, security, privacy, performance guarantees...) of the overall grid infrastructure. As conventional proprietary communication links get augmented by ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) based Internet overlays, P2P and other techniques in the Smart Grid, the trustworthiness links across classical power aspects (power community) and computing/communication aspects (DSN community) need to be fundamentally re-thought to provide for improved overall trustworthiness of the Smart Grid. Investigating this synergy, new techniques and challenges forms the premise of the ToSG workshop.
The goal of this workshop (and successors) is to provide a much better understanding of dependability/security issues involved with the Smart Grids' dependency on ICT and to help stimulate research to improve grid trustworthiness. A targeted goal of the workshop will be to facilitate research matchmaking between the electric power researchers and dependable computing communities. We thus hope to create an interdisciplinary community that will bear fruit well past the end of this first workshop.

Topics of Interest
The workshop addresses topics including, but not limited to, the following:
1. Characterization of trustworthiness (dependability, security, performance thresholds...) in the Smart Grid that bridge the requirements (control and ICT) and terminologies (fault, failures, anomalies, disruptions, attacks,...) across the Power and ICT areas.
2. Architectures and techniques for enhanced grid ICT trustworthiness - computing and communication models and mechanisms for functionality, diagnosis, recovery etc
3. Modeling + assessment of Smart Grid ICT
4. Simulation and/or emulation of Smart Grid and ICT infrastructures together
5. Testing/Validation of Smart Grid ICT components and end-to-end infrastructures
6. Threat analysis of Smart Grid ICT and its impact on power stability
7. New and emerging Smart Grid applications with challenging requirements for communication, computation, or coordination
8. Policy management and regulatory issues.

Important Deadlines
Workshop paper submissions: March 7, 2014 - Unlikely to be extended
Notification to authors: April 11, 2014
Camera-ready copy: TBD

Workshop Organizers
• David Bakken, Washington State University, USA
• Jeff Dagle, Pacific Northwest National Lab, USA
• Eugene Litvinov, ISO New England, USA
• Neeraj Suri, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

Program Committee
• Mustaque Ahamad, Georgia Tech., USA
• Ken Birman, Cornell U., USA
• Sandro Bologna, AIIC, Italy
• Andrea Bondavalli, University of Florence, Italy
• Geert Deconinck, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Manimaran Govindarasu, Iowa State U., USA
• Mohamed Kaaniche, LAAS-CNRS, France
• Himanshu Khurana, Honeywell
• Carl Landwehr, George Washington U.,USA
• A.P. "Sakis" Meliopoulos, Georgia Tech., USA
• Lars Nordström, KTH, Sweden
• Stefan Poledna, TTTech, Austria
• Kurt Rohloff, Raytheon BBN Technologies, USA
• Bill Sanders, U. Illinois, USA
• Matthias Stifter, Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria