Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ADMORPH (Towards Adaptively Morphing Embedded Systems)
Période du rapport: 2021-11-01 au 2023-06-30
The world around us is increasingly monitored and controlled by computers. Smart algorithms control all sorts of factory processes and entire distribution chains, vehicles like cars and airplanes can now drive or fly without a human driver, and with the most modern surveillance systems it is no longer necessary that a person in a box keeps an eye on the monitors all night.
Safety
In technical terms, this phenomenon in which physical systems in daily live are controlled via computer technologies are called Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). For CPS, to function properly, it is important that they are resistant to hardware defects and are safe; and the more complex the system, the greater the challenge. Many CPS have applications where reliability is very important. Think of the autonomous cars and airplanes. The systems also sometimes operate in harsh outdoor conditions, so they must therefore be able to deal with system components that become abruptly defective. And of course all systems must be well protected against hackers. Otherwise you run the risk that the factory processes and distribution chains will stop, vehicles will get into accidents and surveillance systems will no longer pick up suspicious situations.
European collaboration
Making complex CPS more robust and secure is the goal of the ADMORPH consortium. ADMORPH is an international European project led by the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The other partners are Thales Nederland, SYSGO S.A.S. from France, the University of Luxembourg, Lund University from Sweden, the United Technologies Research Center Ireland, the Czech Q-media, the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon from Portugal and the University of Augsburg from Germany. The acronym ADMORPH stands for Adaptive, dynamically morphing, mission and safety-critical CPS. As the name suggests, the parties involved have devised a strategy to make the systems more robust and secure by making them more adaptive and flexible.
Conclusion
After the project duration of three years, the team has not only worked out a set of practical solutions for specifying, designing, analyzing and implementing adaptive CPS, but has also applied some of these solutions to a number of existing systems. These real-world applications the project focuses on are: a complex system that controls autonomous aircrafts, a system that provides real-time radar surveillance, and a system that monitors and manages a metro network.
• a coordination language, compiler and middleware for (specifying) adaptive CPS;
• a multi-model model-of-computation to formally model adaptive real-time embedded systems;
• a system simulator and design-space exploration tools for analyzing and optimizing the lifetime of adaptive computer systems;
• adaptive Byzantine fault-tolerance and rejuvenation analysis tools for adaptive
systems, including degraded modes;
• analysis tools for fault-resilient control systems;
• run-time environments for fault-detection, resilient control and task re-execution;
• software update framework without loss of service.
The application of these methods, techniques and tools has been demonstrated in the scope of seven demonstrators produced by the ADMORPH consortium. Three of these demonstrators concern of existing, real-world systems, namely a complex system that controls autonomous aircrafts, a system that provides real-time radar surveillance, and a system that monitors and manages a metro network.
The ADMORPH results have been disseminated using a variety of different channels. For example, there is an active LinkedIn community around ADMORPH (the project has 223 followers on LinkedIn) and the ADMORPH website has been visited frequently. Moreover, the ADMORPH consortium members organized a number of events (like special sessions and workshops) at, for example, the HiPEAC, DATE and RTSS conferences. Last but not least, the project produced a substantial number of scientific research papers. Regarding the exploitation of research results, various activities have been initiated. For instance, a so-called TechTracker (overview of open-source software tools developed in ADMORPH) and DemoTracker (overview of developed demo’s) were produced. Furthermore, as part of NextGenCPSoS, which is a cluster of seven EU funded projects (CPSoSaware, SMART4ALL, ADEPTNESS, ADMORPH, HiPEAC, DIH4CPS and TEACHING), aiming at developing new technologies and approaches for cyber-physical systems of systems, our project participated in creating an informative factsheet and video.