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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Contracts and Grants

FP7 ICT FET IP CONNECT

Participants : Emil Andriescu, Amel Bennaceur, Luca Cavallaro, Nikolaos Georgantas, Sneha-Sham Godbole, Valérie Issarny, Rachid Saadi, Daniel Sykes.

  • Name: Connect – Emergent Connectors for Eternal Software Intensive Networked Systems

  • URL: http://www.connect-forever.eu/

  • Related activities: §  6.2

  • Period: [February 2009 - July 2012]

  • Partners: Inria (CRI Paris-Rocquencourt) [project coordinator], CNR (Italy), DoCoMo (Germany), Lancaster University (UK), Thales Communications SA (France), Universita degli Studi L'Aquila (Italy), Technische Universitaet Dortmund (Germany), University of Oxford (UK), Uppsala Universitet (Sweden), Peking University (China).

The Connect Integrated Project aims at enabling continuous composition of networked systems to respond to the evolution of functionalities provided to and required from the networked environment. At present the efficacy of integrating and composing networked systems depends on the level of interoperability of the systems's underlying technologies. However, interoperable middleware cannot cover the ever growing heterogeneity dimensions of the networked environment. Connect aims at dropping the interoperability barrier by adopting a revolutionary approach to the seamless networking of digital systems, that is, synthesizing on the fly the connectors via which networked systems communicate. The resulting emergent connectors are effectively synthesized according to the behavioral semantics of application- down to middleware-layer protocols run by the interacting parties. The synthesis process is based on a formal foundation for connectors, which allows learning, reasoning about and adapting the interaction behavior of networked systems at run-time. Synthesized connectors are concrete emergent system entities that are dependable, unobtrusive, and evolvable, while not compromising the quality of software applications. To reach these objectives the Connect project undertakes interdisciplinary research in the areas of behavior learning, formal methods, semantic services, software engineering, dependability, and middleware. Specifically, Connect investigates the following issues and related challenges: (i) Modeling and reasoning about peer system functionalities, (ii) Modeling and reasoning about connector behaviors, (iii) Runtime synthesis of connectors, (iv) Learning connector behaviors, (v) Dependability assurance, and (vi) System architecture. The effectiveness of Connect research is assessed by experimenting in the field of wide area, highly heterogeneous systems where today's solutions to interoperability already fall short (e.g., systems of systems).

FP7 ICT IP CHOReOS

Participants : Sandrine Beauche, Nebil Ben Mabrouk, Benjamin Billet, Nikolaos Georgantas, Sara Hachem, Valérie Issarny, Animesh Pathak, Roberto Speicys Cardoso.

  • Name: CHOReOS – Large Scale Choreographies for the Future Internet

  • URL: http://www.choreos.eu/

  • Related activities: §  6.3

  • Period: [February October 2010 - September 2013]

  • Partners: BPI (Lithuania), CEFRIEL (Italy), CNR (Italy), eBM WebSourcing S.A.S (France), Inria (CRI Paris-Rocquencourt) [scientific leader], MLS Multimedia A.E. (Greece), OW2 Consortium, Thales Communications S.A. (France) [coordinator], The City University, London (UK), Università degli Studi dell'Aquila (Italy), Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil), University of Ioannina (Greece), SSII VIA (Latvia), Virtual Trip Ltd. (Greece), Wind Telecommunicazioni S.p.A (Italy).

CHOReOS aims at assisting the engineering of software service compositions in the revolutionary networking environment created by the Future Internet. Indeed, sustaining service composition and moving it closer to the end users in the Future Internet is a prime requirement to ensure that the wealth of networked services will get appropriately leveraged and reused. This again stresses the required move from static to dynamic development, effectively calling for adequate support for service reuse; much like software reuse has been a central concern in software engineering over the last two decades. This is why CHOReOS adopts the Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm, where networked resources are abstracted as services so as to ease their discovery, access and composition, and thus reuse. However, although latest advances in the SOC domain enable facing (at least partly) the requirements of today's Internet and related networking capabilities, engineering service compositions in the light of the Future Internet challenges — in particular the ultra large scale (ULS) on all imaginable dimensions as well as the evolution of the development process from a mostly static process to a dynamic user-centric one — is far from adequately addressed. Therefore, the CHOReOS goal is to address these challenges by devising a dynamic development process, and associated methods, tools and middleware, to sustain the composition of services in the Future Internet.

FP7 PEOPLE Requirements@run.time

Participants : Nelly Bencomo, Valérie Issarny.

This project uses the novel notion of requirements reflection, that is, the ability of a system to dynamically observe and reason about its requirements. It aims to address the need of having systems requirements-aware by reifying requirements as run-time objects (i.e. requirements@run.time). These systems provide a runtime model of their requirements that allow them to reason, evaluate and report on their conformance to their requirements during execution.This project contributes towards development of conceptual foundations, engineering techniques, and computing infrastructure for the systematic development of dynamically-adaptive systems based on the principle of requirements reflection The researchers build upon their extensive expertise in the area of reflective middleware and reflective architectures and research projects like Connect .

FP7 ICT NoE NESSoS

Participants : Valérie Issarny, Animesh Pathak, Rachid Saadi, Amir Seyedi.

  • Name: NESSoS – Network of Excellence on Engineering Secure Future Internet Software Services and Systems

  • URL: http://www.nessos-project.eu

  • Related activities: § 6

  • Period: [October 2010 - March 2013]

  • Partners: Atos Origin (Spain), CNR (Italy) [coordinators], ETH Zürich (Switzerland), IMDEA Software (Spain), Inria (EPI ARLES, CASSIS, and TRISKELL), KU Leuven (Belgium), LMU München (Germany), Siemens AG (Germany), SINTEF (Norway), University Duisburg-Essen (Germany), Universidad de Malaga (Spain), Università degli studi di Trento (Italy).

The Network of Excellence on Engineering Secure Future Internet Software Services and Systems (NESSoS) aims at constituting and integrating a long lasting research community on engineering secure software-based services and systems. The NESSoS engineering of secure software services is based on the principle of addressing security concerns from the very beginning in system analysis and design, thus contributing to reduce the amount of system and service vulnerabilities and enabling the systematic treatment of security needs through the engineering process. In light of the unique security requirements exposed by the Future Internet, new results are achieved by means of an integrated research, as to improve the necessary assurance level and to address risk and cost during the software development cycle in order to prioritize and manage investments. NESSoS integrates the research labs involved; NESSoS re-addresses, integrates, harmonizes and fosters the research activities in the necessary areas, and increases and spreads the research excellence. NESSoS also impacts training and education activities in Europe to grow a new generation of skilled researchers and practitioners in the area. NESSoS collaborates with industrial stakeholders to improve the industry best practices and support a rapid growth of software-based service systems in the Future Internet.

FP7 ICT CA EternalS

Participants : Amel Bennaceur, Valérie Issarny, Animesh Pathak, Daniel Sykes.

  • Name: EternalS – Trustworthy Eternal Systems via Evolving Software, Data and Knowledge

  • URL: http://www.eternals.eu

  • Related activities: §  6.2

  • Period: [March 2010 - February 2013]

  • Partners: Inria (CRI Paris-Rocquencourt), KU Leuven (Belgium), Queen Mary University (UK), University of Chalmers (Sweden), University of Trento (Italy), Waterford Institute of Technology (Ireland).

Latest research work within ICT has allowed to pinpoint the most important and urgently required features that future systems should possess to meet users' needs. Accordingly, methods making systems capable of adapting to changes in user requirements and application domains have been pointed out as key research areas. Adaptation and evolution depend on several dimensions, e.g., time, location, and security conditions, expressing the diversity of the context in which systems operate. A design based on an effective management of these dimensions constitutes a remarkable step toward the realization of Trustworthy Eternal Systems. The EternalS Coordination Action specifically aims at coordinating research in that area based on a researcher Task Force together with community building activities, where the organization of large workshops and conferences is just one of the tools that will be used to conduct a successful CA.

PHC Ulysses: Middleware for Mobile Social Applications in Smart Urban Environments

Participant : Animesh Pathak.

  • Name: Middleware for Mobile Social Applications in Smart Urban Environments

  • Related activities: §  6.6

  • Period: [Jan 2011 - December 2011]

  • Partners: Inria (CRI Paris-Rocquencourt), Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

This project aims at investigating how the exploitation of novel information and communication technologies (ICT) in the field of mobile social networking can improve the quality of life of citizens. In particular, it investigates how novel shared urban infrastructures, such as bike sharing schemes, can become neighborhood hubs and offer community services to users. For example as users collect a bike, the application that they have installed on their smart phone synchronizes with the infrastructure installed on the bike sharing station, automatically retrieving information relevant to their interests and publishing any prepared postings. Users can read information or prepare postings at their leisure. The main research questions that need to be addressed to fulfill this vision include: (i) the design of appropriate data representation, management and exchange models, to support different types of data (local vs. global, short-lived vs. long-lived), to deal with distributed/inconsistent knowledge, as well as with data provenance and authentication; (ii) the seamless integration of different computing platforms and architectures (e.g., user devices, city infrastructure); (iii) the need for adequate privacy and security support to protect personal social data; and (iv) the need to design applications that are able to deal with the scale of urban environments. The project relies on the Yarta middleware (§  5.6 ), which includes a flexible and expressive representational framework for social data, tools to develop application-specific data models, and a set of middleware components to manage social information in mobile environments.