model-Based fRamework for dependable sensing and Actuation in INtelligent decentralized IoT systems

Project Information

BRAIN-IoT

Grant agreement ID: 780089

DOI

10.3030/780089

Project closed

EC signature date 31 October 2017

Start date 1 January 2018

End date 31 March 2021

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 4 992 581,25

EU contribution

€ 4 992 581,00

Coordinated by

FONDAZIONE LINKS - LEADING INNOVATION & KNOWLEDGE FOR SOCIETY
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BRAIN-IoT (model-Based fRamework for dependable sensing and Actuation in INtelligent decentralized IoT systems)

Reporting period: 2019-07-01 to 2021-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Modern applications in the IoT and CPS domain will be complex software ecosystems with strict requirements of geographic distribution, heterogeneity, dynamic evolution, security and privacy protection, highly more challenging than the ones required by the current environments. Two of the main challenges arising in the current Internet Of Things scenarios are, on oneside, the requirement of interconnecting several heterogeneous platforms and smart Things in the same environment and, on the other side, the need to be able to evolve the complex software ecosystem deployed, reacting automatically and at runtime to environmental changes and, more specifically, to anomalies and critical events.
BRAIN-IoT project focused on the realization of the BRAIN-IoT Platform, a meta operating systems for the implementation and execution of decentralized IoT (Internet of Things) applications with computing capacity at the edge, in a computing continuum with the cloud. Such Platform aims at reducing the effort of developing, validating, operating, and monitoring IoT Systems based on new and existing IoT Services.
BRAIN-IoT Platform has been developed to lie within the scope of the Next-Generation Internet of Things concept. The next generation of Internet of Things is characterized by the usage of smart solutions with embedded intelligence at the edge that relies on high connectivity, processing capabilities for edge devices and real-time analysis of information.

The main objectives of the project are summarized as follows:
** Definition of a Modeling Language for IoT and CPS service composition enabling the creation of mashups of existing and new IoT services communicating with different protocols.
** Enabling self-adaptive deployment and management of distributed IoT systems
** Adoption of AI and non-AI based services to detect or predict failures and critical events, enabling system self-healing and resiliency capabilities through the automation software re-deployment or action execution at runtime.
** Enforcing Security and Privacy in ditributed systems
** Complex IoT systems validation and safety enforcement

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

BRAIN-IoT faced two of the main challenges arising in the current Internet of Things scenarios, on one side, the requirement of designing complex orchestrating applications involving several heterogeneous platforms and smart Things interconnected to each other and, on the other side, the need to be able to instantiate, operate and evolve the complex software ecosystem, reacting automatically and at runtime to environmental changes, without the human intervention. BRAIN-IoT worked on the development of a new AI driven IoT management system to realize a tremendous advantages when you scale IoT systems for critical industrial purposes. Moreover, the project focused also to the security, privacy and resiliency of such IoT-based control systems for the critical infrastructures. The main outcome of the project has been the so called BRAIN-IoT Platform.
RAIN-IoT Platform has been demonstrated in two main usage scenarios have been taken into account: the Critical Infrastructure, with specific use-cases in the field of Smart Water Management, and the Service Robotics, with use-cases identified in the field of Smart Warehouses. The BRAIN-IoT Platform is mainly composed by 3 integrated macro frameworks:
** The Modeling and Validation Framework for Reusable Smart Behaviours.
** The Distributed Execution Platform.
** The Security framework.
The BRAIN-IoT Platform has been implemented with the main objective of driving the Digital Transformation toward a Smart World, exploiting data and computational process from field-level devices, sensors, actuators, cyber-physical systems, as well as computing edge nodes and servers.
The three main frameworks are composed of several integrated modules associated to specific functional roles (see Figure 1)

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The main ambitions to realize the innovation potential of the BRAIN-IoT Project are:
* Develop a technical framework suitable to foster reusability and convergence of IoT and CPS solutions: IoT and CPS have traditionally been two separate research and innovation fields. As CPS (and CPSoS) grow in scale, and IoT application needs start to involve actuation and dependable control, technical foundations for convergence needs to be built in order to facilitate re-use of existing solutions and exchange across the two fields. BRAIN-IoT will pave the way for such convergence to happen, opening new innovation fields and market opportunities.
* Foster the development of security- and privacy-aware systems in the IoT domain and beyond: as technology progresses, keeping privacy and security policy aligned becomes more and more difficult to achieve. BRAIN-IoT has the ambition to change this trend, by cross-linking application modelling and privacy policies modelling. Moreover, BRAIN-IoT will focus on all prevention aspects of security (confidentiality, integrity, and availability). To provide secure IoT solutions, BRAIN-IoT will propose methods and tools for the validation of IoT platforms in terms of safety, availability, secrecy, and trustworthiness across from the model to the platform.
* Develop innovative distributed management capabilities to support the creation and evolution of open IoT environments: while some existing platforms already support some federation capabilities, BRAIN-IoT aims at enhancing such federation capabilities to support a highly dynamic and heterogeneous environment and to develop innovative fully distributed management functionalities enabling the creation and deployment of IoT federated environments.
* Engage in a dissemination and standardization initiative that gives Europe a first-mover advantage: BRAIN-IoT has the ambition to standardize its high-profile achievements in open standardization groups in the IoT domain and beyond, resulting in more horizontal exploitation activities.

Figure 1: BRAIN-IoT Platform Architecture