Carapace

Cyber-physical systems are complex as they combine interactions between computing components and the physical world through network communications. They are increasingly prevalent in many fields: energy, transportation, smart homes/cities, etc. Ensuring their robustness is a significant issue that impacts development costs and timelines, as well as the company’s reputation. Currently, this is addressed in an ad hoc manner with highly variable practices and priorities.

Concretely, the project offers methods and tools tailored for use by SMEs during the design, testing, and operational phases, relying on case studies provided by an industrial committee of SMEs accompanying the project. First, the project advocates a robust design approach "by design" based on identifying robustness properties and verifying the proposed architecture’s ability to ensure them. Next, during the testing phase, an adaptation of the Chaos Engineering approach, initially developed for Cloud systems, is proposed for use on CPS by SMEs. Finally, a last line of defense is established with mechanisms for detecting anomalies relative to the system’s stable operation.

The impact is not limited to improving reliability and availability but also concerns productivity, integration timelines, control of maintenance costs, and the image of the products/company.

This project is based on a collaboration between CETIC and UCLouvain. CETIC focuses on the testing phase with an approach based on chaos engineering and its application in SMEs. UCLouvain contributes its academic expertise in the upstream verification of robustness properties and in anomaly detection during system operation.