Final Report Summary - RELATE (Trans-European Research Training Network on Engineering and Provisioning of Service-Based Cloud Applications)
RELATE is a European training network for young researchers in the field of cloud computing and service science. The project is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network funded by the European Commission in the 7th framework program.
Project Coordinator: Dr. Samuel Kounev (samuel.kounev@kit.edu)
Website: www.relate-itn.eu
The emergence of cloud computing in combination with the advancement in mobile computing poses new challenges in the area of service engineering and provisioning. Service operation is decoupled from the service access layer to form a new service provisioning model where everything is being provided as a service (XaaS). Thus, the decoupling of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) layers that are under different administrative control make the design and delivery of next generation IT services within the cloud landscape a challenging task. In particular, the increased system complexity and dynamics of the future cloud service ecosystems together with the separation of service providers and infrastructure providers leads to inability to provide quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees to cloud customers.
The RELATE ITN was established to create a European Network on cloud computing offering young researchers the opportunity to obtain training and research experience on the latest technologies, platforms and tools in the area of cloud computing and service engineering. The main objectives of the ITN are:
- To establish a network of international academic and industrial partners for a joint research training effort in the area of engineering and provisioning service-based cloud applications. The training is intended to not only shape high-level academic researchers, but also to educate the next generation experts and innovators in the European software industry.
- Through an integrative and multidisciplinary research approach, RELATE aims to promote the advancement of the state-of-the-art in the related areas of model-driven engineering and formal methods, service-based mash-ups and application integration, security, performance, and trust in service-based cloud applications, and quality management and business model innovation.
To achieve such a European wide training network, during the last four years several training events had been organized to train the fellows for the international job market. Five Multi-Skills Training Camps were organized in which the fellows had the chance to present their individual research projects to the entire consortium and to receive feedback from full- and associate partners. At the same time these scientific meetings were accompanied by research management sessions focused on soft skills training. Additionally 12 Open Excellence Workshops have taken place, which lasted from 1 to 5 days. The participating fellows had the opportunity to exchange knowledge and experience with internal and external scientists. Each workshop was dedicated to a specific scientific topic e.g. From service-based cloud application research to market (CAS), Model-driven techniques for cloud computing (UR1), Online Models for Quality-of-Service and Resource Management in Modern IT Systems (KIT) or (Formal) Models of Composition (KCL). The format of the workshops varied from keynote speeches and invited lectures to open discussions and practical sessions providing hands-on experiences. Another element in the training actions were the network-wide workshops. Two of these (HotTopiCS 2013 and RELATE Winter School 2015) took place during the runtime of RELATE with the objective of exposing our ESRs and showcase the achievements of the network to the wider European scientific community working on Service-Oriented Computing Research. To this end, academic and industrial partners across Europe formed a cooperative training network in an effort to educate and train the 29 fellows (including 23 early-stage and six experienced researchers) within the network. Each fellow is in charge of an individual research project that tackles a specific research topic within the area of service-based cloud applications. The individual research topics form a research roadmap (Fig1) that covers the areas of service engineering, optimization, performance, trust and quality management.
[Figure 1 Research topic overview]
Some notable achievements include:
• a novel formalism for describing cloud usage scenarios published as officially endorsed technical report by Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) in collaboration with leading cloud providers,
• an approach for variability management in modelling languages combining techniques from model-driven engineering and software product lines to manage the commonalities and differences between cloud-providers,
• a framework for model-driven development of scalable service-oriented systems in highly distributed, heterogeneous and open-ended environments based on a new ensemble-based component model,
• a novel approach for efficient trade-off optimization of service compositions using nature-inspired meta-heuristics leveraging surrogate objective function models,
• a language for network performance modelling and analysis,
• an approach for formal specification and design-time analysis of provenance awareness for composite services,
• a framework for proactive adaptation by integrating predictive analysis in self-adaptive systems
• a framework for model-driven design of ensemble-based component systems
• a method for resource reservation in pervasive middleware
• a simulation framework for cyber-physical systems
• a methodology and tool for evaluation of intrusion detection systems in virtualized environments
• a monitoring and analysis framework for service-based cloud application platforms
These scientific results have been published in 12 journal articles, 81 conference and workshop papers, 6 book chapters, and 16 technical reports. The list of publications can be found at http://www.relate-itn.eu/publications/(si apre in una nuova finestra)
The fellow achievements were recognized by a number of international awards and recognitions, including the following:
• SPECtacular Award 2014 (A. Milenkoski) from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), Dublin, Ireland, 2014.
• SPECtacular Award 2013 (A. Milenkoski) from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), Prague, Czech Republic, 2013.
• Best Paper Award (R. Dautov) at DSC 2012, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2012.
• Best Poster Award (R. Dautov) at 9th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web, Cercedilla, Spain, 2012.
• Best St. Paper Award (K. Chatziprimou) at IEEE CloudCom 2013, Bristol, UK.
• 2nd Place at ACM Student Research Competition (I. Gerostathopoulos) at ACM/IEEE MODELS 2014, Valencia, Spain.
• 3rd Place at ACM Student Research Competition (A. Verdejo) at ACM/IEEE MODELS 2014, Valencia, Spain.
Project Coordinator: Dr. Samuel Kounev (samuel.kounev@kit.edu)
Website: www.relate-itn.eu
The emergence of cloud computing in combination with the advancement in mobile computing poses new challenges in the area of service engineering and provisioning. Service operation is decoupled from the service access layer to form a new service provisioning model where everything is being provided as a service (XaaS). Thus, the decoupling of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) layers that are under different administrative control make the design and delivery of next generation IT services within the cloud landscape a challenging task. In particular, the increased system complexity and dynamics of the future cloud service ecosystems together with the separation of service providers and infrastructure providers leads to inability to provide quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees to cloud customers.
The RELATE ITN was established to create a European Network on cloud computing offering young researchers the opportunity to obtain training and research experience on the latest technologies, platforms and tools in the area of cloud computing and service engineering. The main objectives of the ITN are:
- To establish a network of international academic and industrial partners for a joint research training effort in the area of engineering and provisioning service-based cloud applications. The training is intended to not only shape high-level academic researchers, but also to educate the next generation experts and innovators in the European software industry.
- Through an integrative and multidisciplinary research approach, RELATE aims to promote the advancement of the state-of-the-art in the related areas of model-driven engineering and formal methods, service-based mash-ups and application integration, security, performance, and trust in service-based cloud applications, and quality management and business model innovation.
To achieve such a European wide training network, during the last four years several training events had been organized to train the fellows for the international job market. Five Multi-Skills Training Camps were organized in which the fellows had the chance to present their individual research projects to the entire consortium and to receive feedback from full- and associate partners. At the same time these scientific meetings were accompanied by research management sessions focused on soft skills training. Additionally 12 Open Excellence Workshops have taken place, which lasted from 1 to 5 days. The participating fellows had the opportunity to exchange knowledge and experience with internal and external scientists. Each workshop was dedicated to a specific scientific topic e.g. From service-based cloud application research to market (CAS), Model-driven techniques for cloud computing (UR1), Online Models for Quality-of-Service and Resource Management in Modern IT Systems (KIT) or (Formal) Models of Composition (KCL). The format of the workshops varied from keynote speeches and invited lectures to open discussions and practical sessions providing hands-on experiences. Another element in the training actions were the network-wide workshops. Two of these (HotTopiCS 2013 and RELATE Winter School 2015) took place during the runtime of RELATE with the objective of exposing our ESRs and showcase the achievements of the network to the wider European scientific community working on Service-Oriented Computing Research. To this end, academic and industrial partners across Europe formed a cooperative training network in an effort to educate and train the 29 fellows (including 23 early-stage and six experienced researchers) within the network. Each fellow is in charge of an individual research project that tackles a specific research topic within the area of service-based cloud applications. The individual research topics form a research roadmap (Fig1) that covers the areas of service engineering, optimization, performance, trust and quality management.
[Figure 1 Research topic overview]
Some notable achievements include:
• a novel formalism for describing cloud usage scenarios published as officially endorsed technical report by Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) in collaboration with leading cloud providers,
• an approach for variability management in modelling languages combining techniques from model-driven engineering and software product lines to manage the commonalities and differences between cloud-providers,
• a framework for model-driven development of scalable service-oriented systems in highly distributed, heterogeneous and open-ended environments based on a new ensemble-based component model,
• a novel approach for efficient trade-off optimization of service compositions using nature-inspired meta-heuristics leveraging surrogate objective function models,
• a language for network performance modelling and analysis,
• an approach for formal specification and design-time analysis of provenance awareness for composite services,
• a framework for proactive adaptation by integrating predictive analysis in self-adaptive systems
• a framework for model-driven design of ensemble-based component systems
• a method for resource reservation in pervasive middleware
• a simulation framework for cyber-physical systems
• a methodology and tool for evaluation of intrusion detection systems in virtualized environments
• a monitoring and analysis framework for service-based cloud application platforms
These scientific results have been published in 12 journal articles, 81 conference and workshop papers, 6 book chapters, and 16 technical reports. The list of publications can be found at http://www.relate-itn.eu/publications/(si apre in una nuova finestra)
The fellow achievements were recognized by a number of international awards and recognitions, including the following:
• SPECtacular Award 2014 (A. Milenkoski) from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), Dublin, Ireland, 2014.
• SPECtacular Award 2013 (A. Milenkoski) from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), Prague, Czech Republic, 2013.
• Best Paper Award (R. Dautov) at DSC 2012, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2012.
• Best Poster Award (R. Dautov) at 9th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web, Cercedilla, Spain, 2012.
• Best St. Paper Award (K. Chatziprimou) at IEEE CloudCom 2013, Bristol, UK.
• 2nd Place at ACM Student Research Competition (I. Gerostathopoulos) at ACM/IEEE MODELS 2014, Valencia, Spain.
• 3rd Place at ACM Student Research Competition (A. Verdejo) at ACM/IEEE MODELS 2014, Valencia, Spain.