Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

The research goals of the Dream project-team concern monitoring complex systems. The challenge is to design smart systems, both adaptable and dependable, to answer the demand for self-healing embedded systems. The considered systems meet a fixed common goal (or contract), possibly expressed by a set of QoS (Quality of Service) constraints. The Dream team investigates and develops model-based approaches. Dealing with dynamic systems, a central role is given to temporal information and the model specification uses event-based formalisms such as discrete-event systems (mainly described by automata), or sets of chronicles (a chronicle is a temporally constrained set of events). We investigate two main research questions. Firstly, we design and develop distributed architectures and efficient diagnosis/repair algorithms for highly distributed systems. Secondly, we study the automatic acquisition of models from data using symbolic machine learning and data mining methods, with a particular focus on data streams processing. Target applications are of two kinds: large component-based system monitoring applications, like telecommunication networks, and software systems like web services and environmental protection with development of decision support systems to help managing agricultural plots and support high water quality threatened by pollution.

In this context, the research questions we are investigating are the following. Even though they are clearly highly related, we have chosen for the sake of clarity to present them in two distinct paragraphs. The first one deals with on-line monitoring issues and the second one with design and model acquisition issues. Finally, we present some application domains.