Frank Sill Torres

• Dr.Ing.
• Acting Director at German Aerospace Center (DLR)

Maritime container terminals are essential nodes in global supply chains, enabling the efficient transshipment and distribution of standardized cargo containers. The efficiency of these terminals is vital as it determines the throughput rate and operational cost-effectiveness, thereby affecting the logistical efficiency of supply chains and the eco...

This article evaluates the implementation challenges of the Critical Entities Resilience (CER) Directive in comparison with the Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive and the Floods Directive (FD) within the European Union (EU). CER, which aims to enhance the resilience of critical entities, including critical maritime infrastructure, all...

This paper covers the problem of monitoring and surveillance of Offshore Wind Farms (OWFs) in the North Sea area of German Exclusive Economic Zone (GEEZ). The increase of risks connected to current geopolitical situation across Europe is clearly visible. Suspicious activity of Russian fleet in the North Sea, unidentified sources of underwater cable...

This paper presented a brief review of offshore hydrogen production options in Germany and related risks. We describe the main electrolyzer technologies and design options for hydrogen production. The main technology alternatives are alkaline, PEM, and solid oxide electrolysis. Design options for the production are onshore electrolysis, electrolyze...

The 4th European Workshop on Maritime Systems Resilience and Security (MARESEC) is dedicated to the research on Resilience, Security, Technology and related Ethical, Legal, and Social Aspects (ELSA) in the context of Maritime Systems, including but not restricted to (Offshore/Onshore) Infrastructures, Navigation and Shipping and Autonomous Systems....

The Earth's oceans present formidable challenges to exploration and understanding. Their vastness, depth, and hostile conditions, such as under thick ice layers in polar regions or extreme depths under high pressure, make them difficult to navigate. It is essential to monitor the environment and collect data to assess marine biodiversity, ecosystem...

The main function of maritime container terminal operations is to allow transfer of containers between ships and other types of transportation, such as trucks or trains. These transfer operations are often modelled as dynamic discrete-time system of queues, which are controlled by a set of input variables that relate to the available resources. The...

Recent studies have revealed that laser-based Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) attack methods, particularly Optical Probing (OP), pose a serious threat to the security of Integrated Circuits (ICs). State-of-the-art countermeasures focus mainly on approaches in the domain of circuit design to mitigate the OP attack. However, methods to analyze OP, which...

In this work, for the first time, we propose a security evaluation framework, namely Auto-OPS, that automates performing the Optical Probing (OP) attack in simulation on a full GDS-II design file. Auto-OPS empowers designers by automatically extracting the active regions geometry model of each logic cell in the standard cell library or custom-desig...

This paper proposes a H∞ consensus controller for linear multi-agent systems (MASs) with N number of agents using a sampled-data based event-triggered mechanism. This mechanism allows the event-trigger condition to be intermittently examined at constant sampling instances. The proposed controller utilises the state information from neighbouring age...

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are robots capable of operating underwater without the need for human operators. Nonetheless, there is the essential requirement of remote operation capability in case of exceptional situations, such as the encounter of unforeseen obstacles or malfunctions. The corresponding robust controller design is a challe...

Offshore wind farms are becoming ever more important means of energy production. Accordingly, they are started to be considered critical infrastructures with heightened attention on their protection and resilience. This paper studies how the maintenance service can sustain or recover offshore wind farm operations under different stressors. We condu...

Maritime accidents caused by misdeclared dangerous goods have resulted in significant losses over recent years. We study if the amount of these accidents could be reduced by scanning the cargo containers in a port before they are loaded to ship. A combination of methods was used to address this question. We present a summary of findings for our rev...

The increasing use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for environmental monitoring, underwater research, and search and rescue operations highlights the importance of efficient path planning for AUVs in unknown areas. In this paper, we propose a path planning and simulation strategy for AUVs. Our approach involves path planning algorithms and...

The areas of application for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are diverse and are not limited to exploring areas. One additional area of application is the extraction of raw materials for electric-car batteries. This involves gently extracting polymetallic nodules from the seabed so that the seabed is not damaged. For such an AUV deployment, t...

The 3rd European Workshop on Maritime Systems Resilience and Security (MARESEC) is dedicated to the research on Resilience, Security, Technology and related Ethical, Legal, and Social Aspects (ELSA) in the context of Maritime Systems, including but not restricted to (Offshore/Onshore) Infrastructures, Navigation and Shipping and Autonomous Systems....

This paper presents an estimate for the mass of hydrogen that would be needed to power the current fleet of Crew Transport Vessels (CTVs) used for maintaining the German offshore wind farms and how this demand may be geographically distributed. The estimate is based on a calculation of the marine diesel oil consumption of the current fleet, which i...

Offshore wind energy (OWE) production is a crucial element for increasing the amount of renewable energy. Consequently, one can observe a strong and constant rise of the OWE industry, turning it to an important contributor of national energy provision. This trend, however, is accompanied by increasing pressure on the reliability, safety, and securi...

The second European Workshop on Maritime Systems Resilience and Security (MARESEC) was dedicated to the research on Resilience, Security, Technology and related Ethical, Legal, and Social Aspects (ELSA) in the context of Maritime Systems, including but not restricted to (Offshore/Onshore) Infrastructures, Navigation and Shipping and Autonomous Syst...

Using hydrogen fuel may help to decarbonize maritime transportation. This paper presents an estimate for the mass of hydrogen that would be needed to power the current fleet of crew transport vessels used for maintaining the German offshore wind farms. The estimate is based on a calculation of the marine diesel oil consumption of the current fleet....

The topic of this contribution is the investigation in quantitative terms of Offshore Wind Farm (OWF) disturbances due to cyber-attacks, physical attacks and natural causes leading to high-impact low-probability events. The impact of these disturbances was quantified with simulation models of OWFs and identified as service interruption and damage....

Motivated by the transition to renewable energies in the context of ongoing climate change, offshore wind energy is of rising importance for the energy provision on national and international level. This trend, though, puts pressure on the safety and security community to provide appropriate analyses and solutions in regard to safety and security t...

The European Commission (EC) has proposed a new directive on critical entities resilience. The aim is to enhance the protection and to unify the approaches in different member states. The stated novelty of this directive lies in the thought that protecting the infrastructure is not sufficient. Therefore, it is necessary to reinforce the resilience...

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) established new strategies that could lead to a significant reduction in the carbon footprint of the shipping sector to address global warming. A major factor in achieving this goal is transitioning to renewable fuels. This implies a challenge, as not only ship-innovative solutions but also a complete l...

Progressing digitalization and networking of systems and organizations representing Critical Infrastructures opens promising new potentials and opportunities, which on the downside, are accompanied by rising complexity and increasingly opaque interdependencies. The consequently increasing lack of knowledge leads to uncertainties affecting risk asse...

Offshore wind farms in the German North and Baltic Seas have a key role to play in the context of the shift towards renewable energy and in securing electricity supplies in the future. At the same time, however, shipping routes in the North and Baltic Seas are among the busiest in the world, wind farms are increasingly being operated unmanned and c...

In face of the high complexity of modern systems and the increasing reliance on technology, the strategies and methods to evaluate the integrity of systems and the information they provide are of great importance. The use of sensors to provide important information in various applications has become ubiquitous, which puts more pressure on the accur...

The Symposium on Integrated Circuits and Systems Design (SBCCI) is an international forum dedicated to Integrated Circuits and Systems Design, Test and Electronic Design Automation (EDA), held annually in Brazil. The SBCCI has established itself as an important international forum for the presentation of advanced research results on leading-edge as...

From a technical perspective, resilience focuses on the ability of a system to anticipate and to resist external and internal disruptions and disturbances as well as to recover and to learn from such events. This view led to a new paradigm, i.e. away from the classical design criteria fail-safe towards safe-to-fail systems. The former emphasizes th...

This paper presents an approach to generate synthetic wind speed and wave height series for maritime environments with a four-dimensional copula using the Copulas Python library. The intended use of the approach is to generate weather data for maritime infrastructure operations modeling. For example, the ability to built and maintain offshore wind...

Laser-assisted side-channel analysis techniques, such as optical probing (OP), have been shown to pose a severe threat to secure hardware. While several countermeasures have been proposed in the literature, they can either be bypassed by an attacker or require a modification in the transistor's fabrication process, which is costly and complex. In t...

Since logic networks are usually obtained by conventional logic synthesis approaches, they are optimized with respect to abstract or conventional cost metrics such as the number of gates, area, depth, etc. However, these do not apply to FCN circuit layouts in the same way. Final FCN costs highly depend on the utilized clocking scheme and the networ...

In this chapter, the intractability of the placement and routing problems in FCN is taken as a justification for the application of formal methods. An exact algorithm for placement and routing of FCN circuit layouts based on Smt solving is presented. Henceforth, the generation of minimal layouts, in terms of area, from given logic network specifica...

In an effort to establish this book as a stand-alone work, this chapter introduces important fundamentals and notations necessary for the comprehension of the included concepts. Boolean calculus, logic representations, and data structures form the basis for considerations throughout all the remaining chapters. Additionally, the satisfiability probl...

This chapter summarizes the presented concepts and algorithms of this book and draws a conclusion. The significance of the provided research findings is classified and a glimpse into a possible future of the field is given.

This book discusses the main tasks of Design Automation for Field-coupled Nanocomputing (FCN) technologies, in order to enable large-scale composition of elementary building blocks, that obtain correct systems from given function specifications. To this end, a holistic design flow is described, which covers exact and scalable placement & routing, o...

Decades of theoretical investigation led to the consolidation of knowledge in the area of physical design for CMOS circuitry. This chapter provides a first step toward a similar comprehensive theoretical understanding in the FCN domain. Therefore, the placement and routing problem is formally defined in two variants; once as a decision problem and...

In this chapter, an extensible open-source framework for design automation of FCN circuit layouts is presented that is publicly available. The fiction framework was developed alongside the research for this book. The presented algorithms are implemented within the said framework to support open research and to make all claims reproducible. To facil...

Since conventional methods used for the verification of CMOS circuitry do not apply to the FCN domain due to signal synchronization differences, a novel technique is introduced in this chapter. It enhances said conventional methods to adapt them to FCN circuit layouts. As a representative verification problem, equivalence checking is examined. Via...

While an exact algorithm for placement and routing generates solutions of optimum quality in terms of the circuit layout area, its scalability is inherently limited by the problem’s intractability. In this chapter, limiting factors of the problem domain and existing algorithms are identified, which are providing the base for an approximation via ut...

Signal synchronization in FCN is one of the most fundamental differences compared to CMOS technologies. To this end, a detailed investigation in this chapter reveals that certain synchronization restrictions are, in fact, not mandatory but mere optional constraints of valid combinational and sequential FCN circuit layouts. A methodology for driving...

Platforms in the offshore wind energy industry are of particular importance for the uninterrupted functioning of the power grid due to their increasing relevance for the security of supply. Therefore, they require an increased level of protection. The paper presents an attempt for a probabilistic threat modeling and assessment based on a Functional...

The climate change challenges a variety of aspects in our society. One spect is the energy production and the composition of the energy mix. Through the last years the amount of offshore wind farms has increased as well as the structure of the electricity producing infrastructure has changed from a more centralized (power plant oriented) to a more...

Recently, cooperative autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have been deployed in application areas such as surveillance and protection of maritime infrastructures for inspection and monitoring purposes. These cooperative methodologies require wireless transmission of data between the different AUVs operating in the underwater environment. Communic...

Muon tomography represents a new and promising imaging technique, making use of ambient high-energy cosmic ray muons to generate images of three-dimensional volumes. The technique predominantly combines measurements of the Coulomb scattering of muons with sophisticated analysis methods to estimate the composition of objects and their distribution w...

This work discusses the maintenance of Offshore Wind Farms in the context of resilience. Therefore, the relation between the system response to disruptions due to severe weather conditions and redundancy of operating vessels is analyzed. The study is executed using an appropriate simulation model, which employs reported component failures rates and...

The knowledge about the responses to hazardous events is of importance throughout the whole life cycle of a complex system, regardless whether during design or operation phases. These responses also allow to draw conclusions about the resilience of the system. Consequently, there is a need for an extensive consideration of all possible hazardous ev...

Risk monitoring is a fundamental part of risk management that allows detecting changes that might affect the risk consequences and their likelihood. To be effective, the process requires storing the risk information into a so-called risk register. This paper presents an implementation that is realized in form of a relational database. We present th...

Offshore wind farms (OWFs) are important infrastructure which provide an alternative and clean means of energy production worldwide. The offshore wind industry has been continuously growing. Over the years, however, it has become evident that OWFs are facing a variety of safety and security challenges. If not addressed, these issues may hinder thei...

Trustworthiness is an important aspect for systems for IoT application, especially when it comes to solutions in the domains of security or privacy. Integrated circuits are an essential element of IoT systems, and thus, an attractive target. Therefore, one has to assure over the complete design and fabrication cycle, that no harmful changes have be...

The evolution of computer algorithms and micro-architectures continuously leads to novel applications and solutions that explore modern computers’ potential. A drawback of this development is the rising complexity of hardware-oriented tests during software development. This paper proposes Hambug, a method to support developers during software testi...

As a result of the ongoing commitment to climate protection in more and more countries and the corresponding expansion of renewable energies, the importance of renewables for the security of electricity supply is increasing. Wind energy generated in offshore wind farms already accounts for a significant share of the energy mix and will continue to...

This special edition presents seven invited works that focus on different aspects of the design with emerging technologies. With silicon facing barriers to the future development of traditional CMOS technology, it is now time to think ahead and look for new alternatives that can add exciting new characteristics to future applications. In this sense...

Die Session widmete sich dem Thema 'Maritime Sicherheit und das Lagebild der Zukunft' von drei verschiedenen Seiten: (1) Technisch und gesellschaftliche Fragestellungen, (2) Einsetzbarkeit und Akzeptanz, sowie (3) Rechtliche Herausforderungen.

Collision avoidance is one of the main tasks on board ships to ensure safety at sea. To comply with this requirement, the direct ship environment, which is often modelled as the ship’s domain, has to be kept free of other vessels and objects. This paper addresses the question to which extent inaccuracies in position (P), navigation (N), and timing...

The field of computer hardware stands at the verge of a revolution driven by recent breakthroughs in emerging nanodevices. 'Nano Security' is a new Priority Program recently approved by DFG, the German Research Council. This initial-stage project initiative at the crossroads of nano-electronics and hardware-oriented security includes 11 projects wi...

Complex interconnected systems have high demands on meaningful analysis of the impact of failures on the actual service provision. This includes the study of obvious and high probable events, but also failures that are difficult to anticipate, e.g. due to cascading effects or combined events. This work introduces a framework for failure analysis th...

The SBC/SBMicro/IEEE/ACM Symposium on Integrated Circuits and Systems Design (SBCCI) is an international forum dedicated to Integrated Circuits and Systems Design, Test and Electronic Design Automation (EDA), held annually in Brazil. The SBCCI has established itself as an important international forum for the presentation of advanced research resul...

The first European Workshop on Maritime Systems Resilience and Security (MARESEC) was dedicated to the research on Resilience, Security, Technology and related Ethical, Legal, and Social Aspects (ELSA) in the context of Maritime Systems, including but not restricted to (Offshore/Onshore) Infrastructures, Navigation and Shipping and Autonomous Syste...

Offshore Wind Farms (OWFs) have rising importance for energy provision of many regions worldwide. However, their harsh environment leads to considerably higher failure rates and degradation compared to its onshore counterparts. Consequently, OWFs require well-established maintenance processes in order to provide required operational availability of...

Bearing in mind their exposed position and the rising importance for power provision, Offshore Wind Farms (OWFs) are facing a multitude of safety and also security threats. This leads to growing interest in methods for real-time and long-term assessment of the safety and security state of this type of infrastructure. Following this observation, we...

Coarse Grain Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRAs) are an emerging hybrid computational architecture that has the parallel customization benefits of low-level logic devices such as FPGAs and ASICs, while the relative coarseness of these architectures makes CGRAs easier to design for, which is more similar to the traditional processor. In the process...

The offshore wind industry experience a rising importance for the worldwide energy production, which is accompanied by increasing amount of wind turbines and Offshore Wind Farms (OWFs). However, due to its harsh environment and its role for energy provision, OWFs are confronted with several threats that are impacting its safety and security. Conseq...

Early detection of technical errors in medical examinations, especially in remote locations, is of utmost importance in order to avoid invalid measurements that would require costly and time consuming repetitions. This paper proposes a highly efficient method for the identification of an erroneous inversion of the measuring electrodes during a mult...

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is an emerging nanotechnology with remarkable performance and energy efficiency. Computation and information transfer in QCA are based on field forces rather than electric currents. As a consequence, new strategies are required for design automation approaches in order to cope with the arising challenges. One of...

The ability of an infrastructure to be resistant against hazards or to accommodate and recover from hazard-induced destructions and disturbances is characterized as resilience. Usually, infrastructures are engineered socio-technical systems or systems-of-systems. Jackson and Ferris consider the use of finite state machine (FSM) modelling as a suita...

Over the last years with the fast technology enhancement, integrated circuit (IC) companies tend to outsource phases of their production chains in order to reduce time-to-market and development costs. Despite the outsourcing benefits through the world, serious security concerns today affect all phases of IC-design flows. Malicious third-party suppl...

The increasing amount of noise sources in current systems requires a detailed analysis of noise susceptibility of integrated circuits. This is all the more important for analog sensors measuring substrate effects. This chapter presents the investigation of the noise tolerance of Body Built-In Current Sensors that enable the detection of radiation i...

This chapter presents strategies for improving the characteristics of Body Built-In Current Sensors (BBICS). First, the concept of the modular BBICS (mBBICS) is discussed. Its principal characteristic is the separation of the sensing part of the sensor, called head, and the circuitry for generation of the flag, called tail. This division enables hi...

This paper discusses the application of resilience engineering principles by shipborne navigation systems. As a technological system, the ship navigation system comprises all the communication and navigation equipment required to operate a ship. If examined as a socio-technological system, one has to additionally consider the use of the ship naviga...

Near zero-energy computing describes the concept of executing logic operations below the (kBT ln 2) energy limit. Landauer discussed that it is impossible to break this limit as long as the computations are performed in the conventional, non-reversible way. But even if reversible computations were performed, the basic energy needed for operating ci...