CORDIS Archive

NEWS

FP6

The Sixth Framework Programme was decided on June 3, 2002 and the text can be downloaded from several places, for example the EUROPA server.

The specific programmes and the rules for participation have been agreed among all parties and the final version is expected to be adopted in September. Check for the latest information on FP6.

On March 20 a call for expression of interest in putting together Integrated Projects (IP) and Networks of Excellence (NoE), was published in the Official Journal. It resulted in more than 15000 proposals FP6-wide of which about 300 fell within the area of Software Technologies, Embedded Systems and Distributed Systems. The feedback will be part of a general report foreseen to be made public in September. The proposals will fuel the content of the first call under FP6 expected to open in December with a closure March - April 2003. A genuine interest in the new instruments IP and NoE was already demonstrated during our workshop May 2, 2002 on Software Technologies, Embedded Systems and Distributed Systems, see here.

The MAPP project was one of the 10 IST projects chosen for the exhibition during the event in Brussels that will mark the launch of FP6, see here for more information about this event.

CALL 8

This was the last call in FP5 for us, with a deadline of February 21. Eleven projects have been negotiated out of a very large submission and all but 3 have already started. We have thus kept the short time to contract already achieved for the call 7 proposals.

PROJECT INFORMATION

Newly started projects

From Call 7 the following eleven projects started on April 1, 2002:

32407 CONSENSUS

Development of a "Renderer Independent Mark-up Language" to support cost effective development of applications to run on many different mobile devices.

34431 COGENTS

This project takes a new approach to numerical simulation using agent technology, software components and web repositories, with an example in process modelling using the CAPE-OPEN standard.

34879 AGNULA

Support for the development of derived distributions of Linux dedicated to audio and multimedia.

34340 EUPKI

Provision of a trusted, open and interoperable Public Key Infrastructure to be specified by social and business partners and demonstrated with major industrial partners.

35174 OPENEVIDENCE

Production of technology for evidence creation and evidence validation in the context of electronic or dematerialised documents and activities as an open source development. It will build on the infrastructure provided in EUPKI but also monitor other open source PKI projects and evaluate the relationship with these.

35485 CBSEnet

The aim of this network is to: a) create a European-wide forum for the exchange of information between researchers and developers working in the area of Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE); b) suggest how CBSE technologies could improve software engineering processes in different domains and to propose future research requirements for development and deployment of CBSE technologies.

34069 TAPAS

Development of novel methods, tools, algorithms and protocols that support the construction and provisioning of Internet application services. The project will achieve this objective by developing Quality-of-Service enabled middleware services capable of meeting Service Level Agreements between application services and will enhance component based middleware technologies such that components can be deployed and interact across organisational boundaries.

34438 CONIPF

The project defines and validates a product derivation methodology that is practicable in industrial application. The intention is to use both the product line approach and structure-oriented configuration technologies. The methodology will be developed top-down, starting from requirements defined through case studies and will be validated through application.

34445 COACH

The project is to develops a secure component framework to facilitate the development and the deployment of components for telecom applications. This framework will be an Open Source implementation based on the CORBA Component Model and security services.

34512 OSMIA

Trial of TINA, a proven image analysis research environment, as an open source medical image analysis system and to develop and trial an Open Source Software interface.

34600 MASTER

Provision of automation for the adoption of OMG’s Model Driven Architecture approach to model complex software system families.

Five projects from Call 8 started on June 1, 2002 together with a CRAFT project and three started on July 1:

71401 ATASDAS

The project will adapt a space-based real time software safety methodology to the medical, aeronautical and industrial sectors and develop a prototype to automate dependability analysis of critical real time software applications in these areas.

34118 DUST

This dual use study is broadly expected to contribute to future Information Society Technologies programme development and prioritisation. In particular, this study is designed to improve the co-ordination, planning and exploitation of dual-use IST, with a view to strengthening European industrial competitiveness in defence as well as civil industry.

37520 COMPONENT+

The project is an extension with partners from the Newly Associated States of the running Component+ project. The project develops a new technology to build in test mechanisms into software components. The new partners will help extending pilot projects with real-life systems from a variety of applications and different countries and disseminate to NAS organisations.

37724 ACE-GIS

The project will provide better and more efficient tools for development, deployment, discovery and composability of distributed web-services with special emphasis on the key combination of geographical information and e- commerce services.

37610 MIDAS

The objectives of this Accompanying Measure are:

1. to create a research roadmap for the development of next generation middleware capable of supporting services that are composable and adaptable within the context of large scale systems where quality of service issues ranging from fault-tolerance, timeliness to security and survivability are of paramount importance;
2. to build Europe-wide partnerships for creating a future IP.

37479 EUD-NET

The main objective of this Network of Excellence is to prepare a research agenda in the field of end-user development for the next framework programme. The network will consider the following approaches to end-user development: adaptable and adaptive systems, tailoring of system functionality and user interfaces, means of annotations for individuals and user groups, and the use of effective visual and multimedia representations. Both single and co-operative development environments will be taken into account. See also http://giove.cnuce.cnr.it/eud-net.htm

34482 NAME

The goal of the project is to set up a Network of Excellence to build a research roadmap and to define and start populating an experience framework in XP and other AMs, as the essential prerequisite of future systematic R&D activities.

38541 CUE

This is the European part of an international working group set up together with the US National Science Foundation and the Chinese National Science Foundation. The aim is to identify and contribute to the laying of the scientific foundations of Software engineering as an engineering discipline as well as to act as a cue for the production of a research agenda for the emerging engineering discipline. The Working Group will act as the Steering Committee of a series of Workshops, Summer Schools and related publishing activities.

New software development cycle

In the best practice project SWIFTCO the company SAINCO has developed and tested a new component based development cycle using a variant of the spiral model in which successive stages of analysis, design, coding and testing are repeated cyclically. The project has modified this model by carrying out some of these activities in parallel. Doing so, the total development time has been shortened. The benefit of this new paradigm has been proven in a practical test, developing a man/machine graphical interface for control and data acquisition systems.

The organisational structure of the development department was adapted to the activities included in the new cycle based on the definition of work teams with specific purposes and with shared responsibilities. Each unit had now specialists in programming, testing and documentation at their disposal. The result was that not only the components were generated faster but they came better tested and with better documentation. Overall this gave a much more efficient distribution of the total effort used in the project and resulted in higher quality of the final product. Another consequence is that the reusability of the components has been increased.

It should be added that the new development cycle complies with the software process maturity models SPICE and CMM.

Secure banking applications based on components

BANKSEC proposes to develop a process driven software environment for component selection and application integration, aimed at the banking and financial service sector. The challenge is that products and services often have short lifecycles in this market and new products need to be introduced quickly. The response to this would be a component-based application development with components that can be used in varying business configurations. However, this approach intensifies the problem of assuring dependability in terms of availability, reliability, and security since components from different sources are usually characterised by varying levels of trustworthiness.

BANKSEC is introducing a secure architectural framework for developing dependable systems from trusted and non-trusted components, which translates between dependability requirements for components and systems and assists in the selection of components. The project site http://www.atc.gr/banksec will soon be established.

Open software for Numerical Control

FIDIA S.p.A. develops numerical control systems based on a proprietary hardware and software platform. In the PENGUIN PC best practice project the company has proposed to use open source for the software platform. After 12 out of 18 months the project has picked the Suse Linux distribution with the RTAI real time extensions as OS and selected OmniOrb as middleware. Migration of old NC software is well under way moving towards plug-and-play code and a component based view of real time modules and hardware management. Measurements performed so far show much higher improvements in execution speed than foreseen and FIDIA has therefore decided to use more resources on the project than foreseen in order to profit more quickly from the high commercial potential of the new system. Look at the project Web site http://www.fidia.it/english/research_penguin_fr.htm for more details.

READERS’ OPINIONS

WG9 Report Executive Summary

ISTAG addresses the field of Software technologies, Embedded systems and Distributed systems (the Domain) as its title is given in the Specific Programme implementing the sixth Framework Programme for Community research. The objective of this report is to develop a vision of the challenges and opportunities for European research and industry in the Domain with a view to enable the implementation of ISTAG's vision to "Start creating an ambient intelligence landscape (for seamless delivery of services and applications) in Europe".

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) has been described (ISTAG report "Scenarios for ambient intelligence in 2010", February 2001) as a vision of the Information Society where the emphasis is on greater user-friendliness, more efficient services support, user-empowerment, and support for human interactions. Where people are surrounded by intelligent intuitive interfaces embedded in the environment.

ISTAG has studied the challenges, which the achievement of the AmI vision presents both to the technologies directly related to the production of software and services in general, and to some technologies closely related to this. The impact of AmI on the development of these technologies and their ability to support AmI has been assessed.

The current situation and the challenges faced by Europe in the field of software technologies, embedded systems and distributed systems have been analysed and presented in section 3.2 as Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). The recommendations made in this report build on this SWOT analysis.

AmI includes systems directly under human control and also systems, which control the environment of human beings while not being directly under their control. AmI will involve large, complex, distributed systems and depend on seamless networking. The realisation of AmI will require massive development of application software, middleware and control software, as well as the infrastructure for efficient development and deployment of such software.

The success of AmI thus depends on our ability to effectively engineer and develop the increasingly complex software infrastructure with all the software needed for intelligent devices to provide the required functionality.

ISTAG recommends in section 8 a significant increase of support to research in the Domain.

Most importantly, large improvement in productivity and quality of software will be needed to support the marked increase in complexity, which AmI will introduce. This requires the creation of open development environments providing intelligent support for software developers during the whole lifecycle from requirements assessment, via coding to software maintenance. It should provide methodologies, middleware and tools for the production of code, as well as to support the development process (with agile methods). It should be based on open standards and provide interoperability to allow easy extension with sector specific elements. An important sector in Europe concerns embedded software.

Other important areas for research are generic concepts for middleware technologies and new information management and database technologies.

At the same time, sufficient attention must be given to longer-term foundational research to create a sustainable basis for European software industry. This would relate to the foundation of software engineering as an engineering discipline, and also aim at abstractions in software technologies and complexity and autonomy in software engineering.

In order to build on European industrial strengths, support for these software technologies should promote user-supplier collaborations between secondary IT/Software industry users (i.e. telecom, automotive, aircraft, and process industry) and software tool and component suppliers (often SMEs), supported by academic research.

Specific areas for such collaboration for developing software and service technologies and building software intensive systems are recommended for extra attention.

One is the telecommunications sector, making use of Europe's strength in mobile communication, recommending work related to software for network management, the "Extended Home Environment", and Value-added services creation.

Other industrial sectors where the use of generic software technologies could have a strong multiplying effect on the industry and at the same time help building up a software supplier industry are: European automotive and aircraft industries, and business support (logistics, intelligent decision support).

The co-operation between domain-oriented disciplines and software, system and service technologies should be encouraged in the creation of Integrated Projects and Networks of Excellence. This includes priority areas given in the IST Programme domain "Applied IST research addressing major societal and economic challenges" which require a basis of generic software and service technologies for progress.

The provision of e-government services for the benefit of citizens should be promoted in particular with use of Open Source software. The use of Open Source software should also be encouraged where it could be useful for reasons of European industrial strategy (e.g. infrastructures, middleware, operating systems for devices) and in general for software produced in the IST Programme or indeed in FP6 as a whole.

Finally, attention is asked for stimulating direct exploitation of academic results by supporting spin-offs. In the software and service area, with low initial investment costs, this could create opportunities, especially also in the NAS countries.

NOTES

Almost all FP5 projects related to our unit have started now and quite a few have already finished their work. Next come the FP6 projects. Some will start about one year from now and the "big" ones maybe a bit later. The content of these projects will be guided by the work programme 2003, which in turn will be heavily influenced by the so-called WG9 report. This is the reason for bringing the summary here. The full report is available on our Web site, see below.

PUBLICATIONS

WG9 final report (IST Advisory Group report concerning Software Technologies, Embedded Systems and Distributed Systems: A European strategy towards an Ambient Intelligent Environment), July 2002.