CETIC

PONTE

Corentine Biron — 2010-07-29T10:11:48Z

Background

Data collection on potential application to new diseases and disorders is increasingly considered to be mainly a mean for evaluating the effectiveness of new medicine and pharmaceutical formulas and for experimenting on existing drugs and their appliance to new diseases and disorders. The latter is due to the crisis that is being noticed in the pharmaceutical research and the world economy shrinking, causing reduction in new research funding and the practice of re-positioning existing medications for new uses.

However, benefits expected may also be limited by the presence of side effects and new efficacies may be missed in the trial. Translation into clinical therapy also has to overcome barriers at the preclinical and clinical levels. Thus, bridging basic science to clinical practice comprises a new scientific challenge which can result in successful clinical applications with low financial cost. In addition to the aforementioned context, the results yielding from clinical trials are dependent on the availability of clinical and molecular data and access to patients.

Project's Objectives

PONTE, "Efficient Patient Recruitment for Innovative Clinical Trials of Existing Drugs to other Indications", aims at providing a platform following a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Semantic approach that will offer automatic intelligent identification of patients eligible to participate within well-specified clinical trials for drug repositioning with specific focus on mitigating patient safety risks, reducing clinical trial costs and improving clinical trial efficacy. Work towards this direction involves decision support mechanisms fed with information retrieved from a semantic search engine. The latter operating on top of a data representation linking data within drug and disease knowledge databases, clinical care and clinical research information systems.

CETIC Key Responsibilities

Standardisation activities: continuous interaction with the activities of e-health related international standards, and particularly in the area of semantic interoperability between clinical research and clinical care information systems to the international standardisation activities.

Data representation and organisation: semantic data and metadata representations for clinical trials in order to support interoperability of clinical care information system data, enabling search, data mining and advanced machine learning across clinical care information systems following an SOA approach.

Finally, as coordinator of the project, CETIC is responsible for the overall management with a focus on quality assurance tasks.

Main Achievements

PONTE will provide four main outcomes:

1. Consistent linking of clinical research information systems with clinical care information from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) through the development of a Semantic Specification Language. An innovative Ontology-Based Search Engine able to mine information based on this semantic data representation. Development of mechanisms that automatically identify the semantic information of schemas and detect semantic relationships between the distributed databases constructs. Combination of ontology-driven data integration and text mining techniques to enable the mining of information required from the various heterogeneous data sources involved.

2. Integration of a wide spectrum of existing clinical data standards into an innovative core ontology-driven scheme that encompasses the entire clinical research and clinical care processes within the PONTE purposes. Scalability is considered to be of major importance, the proposed platform will be implemented following the SOA concepts.

3. Advanced authentication and data confidentiality techniques will be incorporated, whereas usage control techniques will be explored for providing access control services as well as privacy protection services.

4. Current legislation related to access and use of patient health data for the purposes of the PONTE platform among other legal issues will be investigated and will guide the PONTE architecture through the project duration

Key Information

Project short name: PONTE

Project full name: Efficient Patient Recruitment for Innovative Clinical Trials of Existing Drugs to other Indications

Project website: www.ponte-project.eu

Type of project: European Commission – Seventh Framework Programme – Information and Communication Technologies – STREP

CETIC budget: 694,875 €

Duration: 36 months – 2010-2013

CETIC departments involved: Software and Services Technologies, Software and System Engineering

Contact: Joseph Roumier

OLDES

Sébastien Rousseaux — 2010-03-01T14:43:41Z

Started in January 2007, the OLDES project aims at developping ICT solutions for the elderly persons to increase their quality of life and wellbeing while staying at home. Besides this technical objective, the project aims at creating a "co-construction" environment in Bologna and Prague in which the future users will be able to efficiently participate to the system definition and elaboration.

Introduction

In the next few years, due to the ageing of the population, Europe and the rest of the world will have to cope with significant challenges in supporting elderly persons and providing them with good quality healthcare services. Many elderly persons live alone at home and have lost most of their social contacts. Most of them suffer from chronic diseases like diabetes or heart failure and cannot visit hospitals or doctors regularly. This complex situation generates expenses which will significantly increase in the near future. For these reasons the European Commission put the research topic “Assisted Ambient Living for the Ageing Society” at the centre of the research programme's priorities.

Project Objectives

The OLDES project started in January 2007. It has two main objectives related to the improvement of the quality of life of the elderly persons living at home.

The first objective of the OLDES project consists in developing IT solutions to improve the quality of life of the elderly persons living at home. More precisely, it aims at developing a low-cost computer-based digital companion for the elderly persons which is connected to their television and which enables them to access online services in an easy and adapted way.

Among the services which were studied, the project is focusing on home health telemonitoring with wireless medical devices (Glucometer, Pulse Oxymeter, Sphygmomanometer, Weight scale, ECG) and interactive online entertainment. The elderly persons are able to access online news, videos and audio content and are able to communicate easily using modern Internet-based VOIP (Voice-Over-IP) communication technologies. OLDES system provides them discussion groups rooms lead by animators who help creating interest and reactions from the discussion groups' participants.

The second objective aims at ensuring an optimal exploitation of the project results. It focuses on engaging all the stakeholders in the co-construction of the system in order to guarantee that the needs of all of them are taken into account and to guarantee the acceptance of the final project results.

From October 2009, two 12-months pilots have been deployed in Bologna and Prague. The objective has been to evaluate the OLDES technical solution and to assess the final acceptance of the system, the improvement of the quality of life of the elderly persons and the economic impact of such systems in Bologna and Prague. Bologna pilot focuses on the assessment of the entertainment system with 100 elderly persons and 10 elderly persons suffering from a chronic disease. Prague pilot validates the health telemonitoring system with 20 diabetic patients.

A High Valorisation Potential

OLDES project has a high potential of exploitation and valorisation. Indeed OLDES system helps the elderly person living longer at home and helps reducing the hospitalisation times. OLDES system also significantly reduces the travel costs for the medical and the paramedical staff who are able to remotely follow the health of the elderly persons. The new communication and entertainment mechanism investigated and developed in the project helps improving the quality of life of the elderly persons by reducing their feeling of loneliness. All these results participate to the reduction of the costs for the society. The development of eHealth solutions for elderly persons concerns many companies and public institutions in the field of: homecare services, Hospitals (public or private) and doctors, medical device development, health informatics, health insurance. All of them could take advantage of the innovative platform and the expertise developed through OLDES project. In Belgium's Walloon region, CETIC started in July 2009 a 5-year regional research project called “eHealth for Citizens” in order to evaluate, implement and deploy eHealth service oriented infrastructure based on the expertise we built through the OLDES project. CETIC is also in contact with companies and Universities in order to exploit the results of the project with the creation of new start-up companies and spin-offs.

CETIC Role

CETIC is a key partner of the OLDES project. It has several roles:
CETIC is the leader of the workpackage related to the platform.
CETIC actively took part in the collection of the user and system requirements.
CETIC took part in the elaboration of the platform specifications.
Making use of its strong expertise in wireless technologies and embedded hardware and software development, CETIC develops the health telemonitoring system and the entertainment system.

Project Results

During the first project year (2007), the OLDES project focused on creating dialog among all the future stakeholders of the platform to help them participate in its construction. Dynamic focused group sessions elicited the needs of all stakeholders. On the basis of these requirements, the stakeholders then built and approved the first specifications of the OLDES platform alpha version.

During the second year of the project (2008), the OLDES project focused on developing the first integrated prototype of the platform based on the collected requirements and the specifications. This prototype was successfully presented to European Commission representatives in June 2007 and served as a tool during the focus groups OLDES partners led from September 2008 to the end of the year. It helped the stakeholders participate in elaborating the specifications of the second prototype, which were finalised in 2009.

During the third year of the project (2009), the work mainly focused on improving the functionalities of the platform and adding new services according to the results of the technical tests. As a result of these developments a stable OLDES system ready to be deployed in the elderly person homes was produced. During the Summer of 2009, the project organised the first pilots. 90 elderly persons got enrolled for the Bologna pilot. The installations of OLDES systems in elderly person homes started during the last quarter of 2009.

Web Site

www.oldes.eu

Type Of Project

6th Framework Programme - STREP

CETIC Budget

555.360 €

Duration

2007 - 2010

CETIC Department Responsible of the Project

Embedded Communication System

C2A

Lotfi GUEDRIA — 2009-03-31T15:36:28Z

C2A project aims to design, develop and implement an intelligent interconnection system for embedded hybrid equipments in the transport and logistics sector. The project tends to optimize and extend embedded resources usage which allows for the composition of new innovative services. This CBC project (Cross Border Cooperation France Wallonia) is related to the operational objective of the Interreg IV-A program targeting to stimulate and strengthen the potential for economic growth and innovation across borders.

Project Goals

The transport and logistics sector in the border region between the Champagne-Ardenne and Wallonia, although highly developed, faces tough international competition implying major investments and resulting in very narrow profit margins. In order to improve their profitability and optimize their processes, companies are increasingly adopting Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Hence, various embedded communicating equipments are becoming more and more numerous inside transport vehicles. Apart from mandatory devices such as the digital tachograph, different other equipments are available such as radio communication systems (GSM / GPRS), localisation devices (GPS), and a variety of miscellaneous tools and equipments for specific needs (data loggers, PC tablet, cameras, mobile phones, On-board computers, etc.).

However, in practice there is a sub optimal and reduced exploitation of theses technologies due to selective and closed hardware and software interfaces. Usually equipments have very limited communication and resource sharing with each others. This results in features redundancy, services duplication, and sub-utilization of deployed hardware and software resources.

To address this problem and allowing rationalization and optimization of investments, C2A project aims to develop a generic technology for interoperability ("intelligent communicating bus") allowing communication and resource sharing between embedded devices in the vehicle.


C2A concept

The project is structured around two main actions:

A Research and Development action (R & D) with a technical objective consisting of design, development and implementation of a prototype for an innovative embedded system (hardware and software) allowing connection and automatic recognition of a wide range of embedded peripheral devices. In this way, any device wishing to communicate and/or exchange data will use this communication bus almost seamlessly.

A dissemination and communication action which objective is to implement a structured and interactive platform involving both ICT services companies as well as transport and logistics operators. This platform aims to allow better needs addressing, and to offer effective services and relevant information about the concerned technologies.

CETIC's role

CETIC is mainly involved in the R&D action of the project. It addresses the development of an advanced embedded system in transport vehicles having a flexible architecture that allow efficient data handling from a wide range of devices, sensors and communication interfaces. The work includes:

A State of the Art on available technologies and research projects related to C2A
Establishment of functional and non-functional specifications
Definition of relevant implementation scenarios
Definition and design of a flexible, open and upgradable architecture
Prototype development and validation

This action is being implemented jointly with the partner CReSTIC. CETIC already has good experience in developing embedded systems for transport applications that it will improve and develop through this project. Besides, CETIC will build its efforts on its expertise of rapid embedded systems prototyping and implementation of wireless communications.

Added Value for Companies

The added value of the project includes the establishment and development of a platform for technological innovation in ICT offering enhanced services to companies active in the field of transport and the logistics in the border region. Indeed, the platform will significantly increase the collaboration between research teams and these companies around the France-Wallonia border. The technology transfer from research centres would be implemented by the specialized ICT services companies, some of which are already partners of the project.

In addition, the R&D action output of the project is a technological innovation which will enable optimized use of existing resources. This enables streamlining investments in equipments, reducing costs and improving competitiveness for companies deploying the solution. The ICT companies can develop new features and services based on C2A system through access and cross-processing of an extended data set. Companies and operators of transport and logistics field can deploy these new services and benefit from their added value.

Project Partners

Subsidised partners :

CReSTIC -Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne (Reims)
CETIC - Centre d'Excellence en Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication (Charleroi)
Carinna – Agence de soutien à la recherche et l'innovation en Champagne-Ardenne (Reims)
INFOPOLE Cluster TIC (Namur)

Associated partners :

Monnier Borsu Sotradel (Charleville Mézières)
Docledge (Isnes)
Smolinfo (Purnode)
Le Forem - Office Wallon de la Formation professionnelle et de l'Emploi (Charleroi)
Gunnebo (Bazancourt)

Website: (temporary) http://www.amiando.com/c2a.html

Projet type: Interreg IV-A France-Wallonie-Vlaanderen

CETIC Budget: 327.000 € (50% FEDER et 50% Walloon region)

Duration: from September 2008 to September 2012

CETIC department responsible for the project: ECS Department (Embedded & Communication Systems)

For further information, please contact CETIC.

RESERVOIR

Christophe PONSARD — 2009-03-09T20:32:57Z

REsources and SERvices Virtualization withOut BarrIERs is an European Union FP7 funded project that will enable massive scale deployment and management of complex IT services across different administrative domains, IT platforms and geographies. The project will provide a foundation for a service-based online economy, where - using virtualization technologies - resources and services are transparently provisioned and managed on an on-demand basis at competitive costs with high quality of service. RESERVOIR consortium is coordinated by IBM Haifa Research Lab, and includes a good balance of industry and academia.

Background

Cloud computing allows data centres to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, delivering on-demand services over the Web, reducing software complexity and costs, expediting time-to-market, improving reliability and enhancing accessibility of consumers to government and business services. Thus, cloud computing represents a true materialisation of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC)'s visionary promise.

In RESERVOIR, we are developing breakthrough systems and service technologies that will serve as the infrastructure for cloud computing. However, conditional to the wide-scale penetration of SOC to the economic landscape, the ICT industry needs to solve several well-recognised technical challenges. One such key challenge is the development of a scalable and effective service-oriented infrastructure. This is the challenge addressed by RESERVOIR.

The vision of RESERVOIR is to enable the delivery of services on an on-demand basis, at competitive costs, and without requiring a large capital investment in infrastructure.

The Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) Equation

To accomplish the vision, our work will extend, combine and integrate three technologies: Virtualisation, Grid computing and Business Service Management (BSM). We believe this approach can deliver ubiquitous utility computing by harnessing the complementary strengths of these technologies. Virtualisation technology has been shown to be useful in overcoming some barriers to commercial adoption of Grid technology. On the other hand, RESERVOIR will add virtualisation-awareness to the Grids, by using low-level monitoring information for metering and billing.

To benefit fully from the dynamic nature of the RESERVOIR computing cloud, the project will develop a uniform policy-driven management layer that will automatically allocate resources to services and monitor execution and utilisation to ensure compliance to Service Level Agreements (SLA) by adjusting resource allocation level and location. The new capabilities of the infrastructure will enable us to explore new allocation policies, optimising over a range of parameters that is wider than what is commonly done today, e.g. the reduction of power consumption.

Main Achievements

The main results of the project will be an architecture for a flexible, secure and scalable service-oriented infrastructure together with a reference implementation. This implementation will be based on open standards and new technologies for the provision of on-demand services. The proposed infrastructure will be tested using several scenarios of complex services which are impossible to achieve with existing infrastructures. These scenarios will illustrate the significant and measurable improvements in productivity, quality, availability, reliability and cost of service delivery.

Benefits

CETIC involvement in RESERVOIR will develop skills in service-oriented infrastructure and make them available to businesses and administrations in the Region. As dissemination and exploitation activity leader, CETIC is responsible for training businesses and governments to use a service-oriented infrastructure. CETIC is also in charge of analysing threats, defining a security architecture, and implementing security solutions for the RESERVOIR infrastructure.

Partners

— IBM Israel - Science and Technology LTD — Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo — University College London — Umea University — SAP AG — Thales Services SAS — Sun Microsystems CmbH — ElsagDatamat S.p.A — Universidad Complutense de Madrid — CETIC asbl — Universita della Svizzera italiana — Universita degli studi di Messina — The European Chapter of the Open Grid Forum OGF EEIF

Website

http://www.reservoir-fp7.eu

Type of project

Integrated Project

CETIC Budget

494 827 €

Duration

2008 – 2011

Articles

Virtualisation of resources and services without barriers - eStrategies

3. CoreGRID (finished)

2009-03-07T21:06:54Z

CoreGRID was a Network of Excellence in Grid technology funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Development. The project involved 46 research teams (including CETIC and the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons) from 19 countries, 18 of which were in Europe. The project brought together 161 full-time researchers and 164 PhD students. CoreGRID has now been re-launched as a self-sustaining ERCIM Working Group covering research activities on both Grid and service computing, while maintaining the momentum of the European collaboration on Grid research.

Background

The objective of CoreGRID was to strengthen Europe's scientific and technological advances in the areas of Grid and peer-to-peer technologies. CoreGRID stayed at the forefront of scientific and technological excellence, encouraged the mobility of researchers, and ensured sustainable integration of research teams beyond the funding period of four years.

CoreGRID was an ambitious programme of joint activities structured around six complementary research areas, namely:

Knowledge and Data Management
Programming Model
Architectural Issues: Scalability, Dependability, Adaptability
Grid Information, Resources and Workflow Monitoring Services
Resource Management and Scheduling
Grid Systems, Tools and Environments

These research areas had been selected on the basis of their strategic importance, their research challenges and the recognised European expertise to develop next generation Grid middleware.

CETIC researchers actively participated in two of the six working groups (called «institutes») of CoreGRID, namely Knowledge and Data Management and Resource Management and Scheduling. CETIC was also responsible for the dissemination activity of the project (Spreading Excellence) and shared its expertise in technology transfer between academic research and industrial companies. Various tasks related to this important mission included organisation of scientific and industrial conferences of the CoreGRID network, communication with the press, leading the CoreGRID industrial advisory board and managing both production and dissemination of marketing materials (brochure, poster, newsletter, etc.).

Main Achievements

CoreGRID not only successfully integrated and coordinated the European research community in Grid technology, but also effectively linked academic research institutes with industry. The project achieved the goal of boosting the EU industrial sector by harnessing research and innovation for businesses.

To gain higher visibility and raise public participation and awareness, CoreGRID Network implemented an integrated programme for spreading excellence targeting researchers and industry-based computer scientists and leaders. Activities included dissemination and communication, liaison with industry, scientific communication, as well as training and education. Major achievements of the CoreGRID Spreading Excellence campaign include:

Establishing an “industrial task force” to strengthen the network's links with industry
Initiating the Industrial Fellowship programme
Active participation in the European and international initiatives such as NESSI (Networked European Software and Services Initiative) and OGF (Open Grid Forum)
Increased public awareness and visibility through marketing material (brochure, annual report) and communication actions (press campaign)
Strengthened the benefits for CoreGRID researchers, thanks to an active and appropriate internal network communication policy, as well as internal workshops

The expertise developed by CETIC researchers during the course of the CoreGRID project can be used by local enterprises to deploy the cutting edge Grid and SOA technologies.

More info on www.coregrid.net

EXTRA

Christophe PONSARD, Fabian Steels, Sanae Saadaoui — 2009-03-06T12:26:25Z

Case studies have shown that experience transfer and knowledge management highly improve efficiency and competitiveness of organizations. Therefore, the developed knowledge management approaches focus big enterprises needs and are neither suited nor applicable to small and very small enterprises. EXTRA's main goal is to help SMEs active in software development and delivery to improve their practices. Product quality and customer satisfaction can be increased by capitalising on the company's previous experiences. In order to do this, the company should record its experiences.

Background

Unfortunately, existing approaches to knowledge management are seldom applicable in SMEs because they often require a large investment in time, resources and money.

The project aims at producing and sharing a set of good practices in software development for SMEs based on:
Theoretical research in the knowledge management area
Feedback from participating SMEs on their current experience in transfer and knowledge management.

The target group of the project is the large amount of European SMEs, that are:
Developing and delivering software products
Operating internationally, or having intentions to expand internationally in the future.

Within the SMEs, very small enterprises (VSEs) are the major enterprise category (more than 90% in Europe). A particularity of these companies is that they often use agile, lightweight or "own" development processes and methods. Therefore existing standards and approaches are not suitable and applicable for VSE.

The outcome of the project is a handbook consisting of a set of tools for managing knowledge inside companies: ideas, step-by-step guides, templates and training material.

The techniques and tools will be specially designed to meet SMEs needs. To this end, the research follows the Action Research paradigm. In this methodology, researchers and users work together. They develop and test innovations in a local context. The work is done in an iterative learning process in which researchers and SME partners collaborate. Their joint objective is to find, understand and solve problems that they have in common. The iterative process ensures the commitment of the actors as well as the quality and relevance of the research.

CETIC is a key partner in the EXTRA project. It has several roles:
leader of the work package related to SME requirements analysis
leader of the work package relative to toolset elaboration
active participation in validation and exploitation tasks
application of its strong expertise in process assessment and improvement methods

Results of the project

Two main tasks were achieved during the first year of the project:

Analysis of SME requirements: A questionnaire was developed to collect the understanding and current experiences of participating SMEs (Belgian SME partners are NSI, Océ Software Laboratories, DocLedge and BSB). The questionnaire addressed participants' current interests and future strategies for knowledge management. A gap analysis was undertaken between SMEs' current and future situations with respect to different types of knowledge management strategies. The results from the SMEs from the three participating countries were combined and analysed. They served as the basis for the handbook.
The elaboration of the first version of the handbook: The handbook will consist of a set of techniques to set up or make knowledge sharing easier inside SMEs. A few techniques for helping SMEs improve their knowledge management were written and submitted to the participating SMEs for comment.

The complete handbook will contain a questionnaire that will help SMEs assess their current level of knowledge management and direct them to the techniques most suitable for them based on their level.

The validation of the techniques will be done by the participating SMEs, which will test these techniques on existing projects during the second year of the project.

Appreciation of the project for the companies

Applying project results in an SME will help increasing the efficiency and competitiveness of SMEs. It can give impact in different ways:
More efficient development and delivery
Improved product quality
Shorter time to market
Product functionality better adapted to market needs
More satisfied customers
Increased market through internationalisation
More motivated, competent and cooperative employees

Partners


ICT Norway	CITEA - Cyprus Information Entreprises Accoquinassions- Cyprus

http://www.cornet-extra.eu

DEPLOY

Christophe PONSARD, Sanae Saadaoui — 2009-03-06T12:10:12Z

DEPLOY is a research project of the European Commission (FP7) which aims at promoting the use of formal methodology in European industry, and developing industrially scalable formal methods. DEPLOY is a technological answer to the increasing complexity of engineering systems, and to our increasing dependence on automated systems for critical tasks, notably in safety-critical contexts.

Project objectives

The overall objective of DEPLOY is to make major advances in the industrial practices of engineering for dependable systems, through the deployment of formal engineering methods and tools.

Industries are facing the challenges of mastering the development of ever more complex systems with ever higher assurance. Formal engineering methods provide an answer to both of these challenges through precise modelling of the system, powerful reasoning support for the models (using automated analysis tools such as theorem provers and model checkers), and afterwards exploitation in domainspecific models and code generation.

Industries are now increasingly considering formal engineering methods. DEPLOY aims at overcoming problems of integrating these methods into industrial development lifecycles, and at presenting evidence of their overall efficiency and benefits in order to foster their adoption.

Throughout the lifetime of the project, DEPLOY methods and tools will be intensively deployed in real industrial settings by the industrial partners in order to test them against the industrial imperatives of cost-effectiveness, scaling and ability to cope with evolution of requirements. The industrial deployment will be in five sectors, each of which is key to the future of European industry and society: automotive, rail transportation, space systems, telecommunications and business information. Each deployment sector will be led by a partner who is a major player in that sector.

DEPLOY capitalises on the latest research from FP6 on formal engineering methods and tools along with related research on combining formal engineering methods with methods for resilience engineering. DEPLOY will deliver major new advances over these existing methods and tools. A number of DEPLOY partners have contributed to these existing FP6 results, enabling the project to take advantage of their existing research and development bases. The rich and complementary mix of expertise with engineering challenges from the industrial deployment partners, together with the extensive technology base of the academic and service providers, comprises a consortium which is ideally suited to addressing the DEPLOY aims and which is unique in Europe and indeed internationally.

CETIC's responsibility in the project is to quantify the benefits gained by the deployment of formal methods in industry. Such a measure is particularly critical, as it will be the main motivation for additional industrial players to deploy formal methods. To this end, CETIC first has to propose concrete measures that can provide such evidence, and then evaluate the improvement in practice of industrial partners when they deploy formal methods.

Main Achievements

The result will include both methods and tools supporting the effective deployment of formal engineering methods in the industrial setting, together with evidence about the effects of applying formal methods on productivity and dependability.

Benefits for companies

For industrial partners achieving greater system dependability is essential to maintaining the competitive edge they currently enjoy through their excellence in engineering. Deploy will provide a validated methodology to introduce formal engineering techniques in a controlled and measurable way, based on large scale experiments conducted simultaneously deployment in five major industrial sectors whose core business is the construction of safety-critical, business-critical and mission-critical systems. Such systems are required to have a high degree of dependability.

Deploy will provide a professional open source development environment for formal engineering methods and because the industrial deployment partners are committed to further improvement of their development processes. The professional development environment will build on the existing successful Eclipse-based RODIN environment.

Particular engineering problems for the industrial partners include the difficulty of requirements validation, the rapidly-growing complexity of system testing, the difficulty of maintaining quality and safety of systems under evolution and the problems caused by trying to integrate components of diverse origin. DEPLOY will address all these issues, helping the industrial partners to achieve real improvements in their engineering processes and, in the longer term, will lead to improvements in European industrial practice more generally.

Project partners

Industrial partners: — Bosch, Germany — SAP AG, Germany — Siemens Transportation Systems, France — Space Systems Finland, Finland — Nokia Research Center, Finland

Industry-oriented partners — Centre of Excellence in ICT (CETIC), Belgium — ClearSy, France — Systerel, France

Academic partners — Newcastle University, UK — Aabo Akademi University, Finland — ETHZ: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland — Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Germany — University of Southampton, UK

Web site

http://www.deploy-project.eu

Type of project

7th European Framework Program - Integrated Project

Budget of CETIC

829.776 €

Duration

2006 – 2009

CETIC department responsible of the projet

Software and System Engineering

SPICES

Christophe PONSARD, Fabian Steels — 2009-03-06T10:58:33Z

Several industries are currently facing the issue of developing mission-critical embedded computer-based systems with increasing complexity, dependability and economic pressures such as cost and time to market. Model-driven development/engineering (MDD/MDE) addresses those issues. Today, sectors such as aerospace, automotive and communications are rather segmented and are prone to study and promote dedicated solutions, whereas cross-fertilisation would be more beneficial. SPICES will implement an integrated MDD/MDE methodology for designing, verifying and implementing avionics mission-critical real-time embedded (RT/E) systems.

Objectives of the project

The main objective of the SPICES project is to produce an integrated methodology for the design, verification and implementation of critical real-time systems in the avionics domains. A crucial project dimension is the ability to cope with to assess on paper that it is properly designed and will meet all its functional and non-functional requirements such as real-time behaviour and safety constraints. Consequently, software architects and designers of mission-critical RT/E systems need early validation techniques coupled with a formal, non-ambiguous and sufficiently informative description of the future system – in other words, a consistent model. Moreover, they need to be able to ensure that the code that will actually run on the targeted hardware is consistent with the validated models. The SPICES project answers this strong industrial need based on the AADL (Architecture Analysis and Design Language) framework. SPICES aims at developing an MDD/MDE-compliant tool suite for the design, verification and development of mission-critical RT/E systems dedicated to the aerospace industry. The tool suite will be based on the architecture analysis and design language (AADL), formal methods, the lightweight common object request broker architecture (CORBA) component model (CCM) and the SystemC system description language, and will target both general-purpose processors and reconfigurable hardware. SPICES modelling, verification and code generation tools will be integrated in the open-source Eclipse platform, more precisely TOPCASED. Other key project objectives for reaching industrial adoption are the language standardisation and the integration in certification process such as DO-178B. The contribution of CETIC is upstream in the development process, at the transition between requirements engineering and architectural levels, especially related to the identification and traceability of critical properties and also the way to derive some initial AADL models. This work is a direct application of the FAUST toolset to this domain.

Main achievements

Consolidated AADL methodology (with formal semantics, increased expressiveness) and industrially applicable in link both with downstream (SystemC, CCM) and upstream methodologies (requirements engineering)
Ecosystem of integrated tools supporting various key aspects of the methodology: ADELE (AADL graphical layer), ADES (AADL behavioral layer), FAUST (requirements engineering), OSSATE (AADL kernel), MAST (schedulability analysis), SoftExplorer (power analysis)
Language standardisation and integration in the certification process.

Benefits

Industrially validated methodology for designing embedded systems; based on an architectural concept and integrated with industrial standards.
Availability of an integrated tool suite supporting key activities for the design of critical embedded systems, especially for the aeronautic domain but also the automotive domain.
Eased adoption thanks to the use of open standard and tool technologies.

Appreciation of the project for the companies

Airbus, Axlog, Barco, CEA-List, Feria, K.U. Leuven, Université de Bretagne Sud, SQS, TCP/SI, Thalès Avionics/Communication France, Universidad de Cantabria, Verimag

Web site

http://www.spices-itea.org/

Type of project

ITEA2

CETIC Budget

Self-funding

Duration

2006 – 2009

Department CETIC responsible for the project

Software and System Engineering

6. QualOSS (finished)

2006-08-28T12:57:45Z

QUALity of Open Source Software (QUALOSS) is a Framework Programme 6 project funded by the European Commission. It is coordinated by CETIC and involves eight partners from 5 European countries, namely Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and The Netherlands.

Project Background

QualOSS is developing a methodology to assess free and Open Source software (F/OSS) endeavours. In particular, the standard QualOSS assessment method evaluates the robustness (capability to handle problems) and the evolvability (capability to remain viable in the long term) of F/OSS endeavours. These two aspects are very important for making informed decisions before integrating a F/OSS component or a new version of a F/OSS component in products, services or infrastructure. Indeed, organisations should only trust F/OSS endeavours that they consider robust and evolvable; otherwise they will run the risk of wasting time and effort learning and integrating F/OSS components that will soon become obsolete.

Besides using the QualOSS methodology to develop a smart F/OSS acquisition programme, companies may also use it to monitor their own software development endeavours. For example, it is possible with minimal effort to tailor the standard QualOSS assessment method to evaluate internal proprietary software projects. In particular, the QualOSS platform that uses the QualOSS methodology will perform automated measurements on data repositories from tools often used by F/OSS projects such as CVS, Subversion, GIT, Bugzilla, and Sourceforge Tracker. But connecting proprietary tools often used in the software industry would definitely be feasible.

Main Achievements

Efforts in 2008 primarily focused on solving the problem encountered with the prototype built in 2007. Based on the lessons learned, the QualOSS methodology is now made to be flexible and to impose rigour when conducting assessments. In particular, it is designed to adapt to many F/OSS acquisition situations and to force information recording to guarantee a high degree of traceability in assessment results. This is achieved by splitting the methodological from the assessment methods.

The QualOSS methodology consists of a framework of requirements that assessment methods must satisfy. The standard QualOSS assessment method was built to fulfil these requirements. Furthermore, it addresses the other weaknesses of the prototype. Firstly, it clearly identifies specific questions that an assessment answers. This in turn makes assessment results easier to understand. Secondly, the standard QualOSS assessment method imposes a workflow to better orchestrate an assessment. In consequence, the synchronisation of datasets measured in an assessment is performed a priori. During the latter part of 2008, measures and indicators needed to answer the clear, specific questions were defined.

In parallel to the R&D effort, an initial set of three industrial case studies was identified. The initial studies aim to verify if the standard QualOSS assessment method can be used, first by AdaCore to assess F/OSS endeavours corresponding to different versions of the GCC backend; second by Océ Software Laboratories to determine whether to integrate the lpr client from yanolc in one of its products or whether to re-implement it from existing OSL internal components; and third by Freecode to identify how to better collaborate with the Asterisk developer community.

In the first half of 2009, the standard QualOSS assessment will be tested on various F/OSS endeavours and also on the initial set of case studies. Subsequently, the measures and indicators will be adjusted until an initial version of the standard QualOSS assessment method is frozen around June 2009. In the second half of 2009, the QualOSS platform will be made more robust. Furthermore, validation on additional case studies is expected in order to check the applicability of the standard QualOSS assessment method to various F/OSS acquisition scenarios. It is also planned to study the effort required to adapt the standard QualOSS assessment method into new, specific QualOSS assessment methods better suited to the F/OSS acquisition scenarios where the standard method is of limited help.

Project website

QUALOSS website
QUALOSS project datasheet

2. BEinGRID (finished)

Damien HUBAUX — 2006-08-28T12:54:18Z

The mission of BEinGRID is to establish effective routes to foster the adoption of Grid technologies across the European Union (EU) and to stimulate research into innovative business models using Grid technologies. Business Experiments in GRID (BEinGRID) is the EU's largest integrated project funded by Information Society Technologies (IST) research, which is part of the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) in R&D. The project aims are to understand the requirements for Grid uptake in the commercial environment involving software vendors, IT integrators, service providers and end users; and to enable and validate the adoption of Grid technologies by businesses.

Project Background

Grid computing uses distributed computing resources connected through a network, presenting them as a coherent and scalable infrastructure in order to get access to a coordinated set of services. While ICT is evolving towards a more widespread use of software services (Service Oriented Architecture - SOA, Service as a System - SaaS) and the use of remote infrastructures (cloud computing), Grid technologies still play a crucial role in this context, by providing high level services to the user (standard interfaces, security, reliability, optimal resource usage, etc.).

BEinGRID has undertaken twenty-five targeted Business Experiments (BEs) designed to implement Grid solutions across a broad spectrum of European business sectors, in order to develop and deploy a critical mass of Grid-enabled pilots with different needs and requirements in terms of technological Grid challenges.

Complementing this work, Gridipedia, a knowledge and toolset repository, is being developed. It consists of Grid service components and best practices to support European businesses with the adoption of Grid technologies.

CETIC key responsibilities

Leading the first wave of 18 experiments, with 70 partners involved and a total effort of about 1100 person-months
Leading dissemination activities
Strong involvement in security analysis and business modelling work packages, and quality assessment of the project dissemination portal Gridipedia.eu

Main Achievements

Three major outcomes available at the end of the second year of the project:

1. The case studies resulting from BEinGRID's first wave of 18 Business Experiments are gathered in a booklet entitled “BEinGRID: Better Business Using Grid Solutions - Eighteen Successful Case Studies Using Grid”. As dissemination leader, CETIC led the publication process and coordinated the content edition across the 18 business experiments.

2. The project is producing four ”BEinGRID Demos” which are promotional material telling stories of successful use of the Grid within industry settings, from both a business and a technology perspective. Two demos were produced this year. One was built on CETIC's Business Experiment “Grid for Architects”. It explains how CETIC built a portal offering on-demand Grid rendering services, providing substantial cost savings to their clients. The demo package contains a key story which explains the business benefits, a set of slides, and a rolling video. The application web portal can be accessed upon request.

3. The BEinGRID project held its Industry Days from June 3 to 5 in Barcelona, in co-location with the Open Grid Forum's 23rd edition. The event demonstrated how businesses can apply Grid technologies to solve a variety of problems. More than 500 participants attended this major Grid event, ranging from Grid experts to representatives from SMEs and large companies interested in learning how Grid can be a solution for their businesses. As dissemination leader, CETIC took a major role in the organisation of the Industry Days, and this event especially showcased the result of the first 18 Business Experiments, which were coordinated by CETIC.