Dependability and Adaptation in Systems-of-Systems

EGIDE PHC Aurora (2009-2010)

Partners

• INRIA Lille - Nord Europe (France): ADAM Project Team
• Universitetet i Oslo (Norway): NDS Research Group

Description

For the last years, Internet has been catalyzing the development of large scale distributed systems. These distributed systems provide users with advanced interaction artifacts developed to achieve a common objective. These systems, while still being investigated predominantly in the defense sector, is also seeing application in such fields as national air and auto transportation, space exploration, and health care, to name a few. These systems, also known as Systems-of-Systems (SoS) are made of heterogeneous pieces of software, which need to be combined in order to build a coherent platform. Keating, et al. define SoS as meta-systems that "are themselves comprised of multiple autonomous embedded complex systems that can be diverse in technology, context, operation, geography and conceptual frame". A remaining challenge of SoS is the dependability and adaptation dimensions.

From a scientific perspective the objective of this collaboration is to jointly research and develop common research projects with the goal of providing innovative approaches for the dependability and the adaptation of Systems of Systems. In particular we aim at developing a common framework that will include a comprehensive support for the following aspects:

Hierarchical SoS adaptation

is concerned with the layered adaptation of SoS. This activity consists in developing adaptation mechanisms that support the consistent adaptation of of thje different layers of a SoS, from the high level application down to the low level hardware resources;

Decentralized SoS adaptation

is concerned with the large scale adaptation of SoS. This activity consists in developing adaptation mechanisms that are able to perform adaptations independently based on information communicated by other adaptation mechanisms deployed in the system;

Dependable SoS adaptation

is concerned with the development of advanced adaptation mechanisms that are capable to cope with failure of non-dependable components. Our second objective is to make the adaptation planning mechanism itself fault-tolerant;

Adaptive SoS dependability

is concerned with providing multiple levels of guarantees, by deploying a variety of mechanisms that achieve adaptation planning in a coordinated fashion. Themechanisms belong to two categories: i) consistent replication techniques based on reliable group communication, and ii) strong agreement protocols.

Clusters

• Cluster 1: Formal Description of SoS Architectures.
• Cluster 2: Adaptation and Dependability of WSNs.
• Cluster 3: Motivating Scenario for Adaptive SoS.

Results

1. RESTful Distribution of Services in Wireless Sensor Networks. Amirhosein Taherkordi, Romain Rouvoy, Frank Eliassen, and Quan Le-Trung. In 4th international workshop on Middleware Tools, Services and Run-Time Support for Sensor Networks (MidSens’09). 6 pages of ACM. Urbana Champain, USA. December 1, 2009. To appear.
2. Supporting Lightweight Adaptations in Context-aware Wireless Sensor Networks. Amirhosein Taherkordi, Romain Rouvoy, Quan Le-Trung, and Frank Eliassen. In 1st International COMSWARE Workshop on Context-Aware Middleware and Services (CAMS’09). p. 43–48 of AICPS 385 (ACM). Dublin, Ireland. June 16, 2009.
3. WiSeKit: A Distributed Middleware to Support Application-level Adaptation in Sensor Network. Amirhosein Taherkordi, Quan Le-Trung, Romain Rouvoy, Frank Eliassen. In 9th IFIP International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS’09). 16 pages of LNCS (Springer). Lisbon, Portugal. June 9–12, 2009.

History

2009/08/24

2nd Research Workshop at UiO (3 days).

2009/05/05

1st Research Workshop at INRIA (3 days).

2009/03/01

Summer Internship of Amir Taherkordi (UiO) at INRIA (3 months).

2009/01/01

Project kickoff.

2008/12/16

Notification of project acceptance by EGIDE.

2008/09/17

Submission of the proposal.