Our research projects

SecureChange  Mogentes   Amber   Diana   Sensoria   Decos   Former projects

Securechange logo Security Engineering for lifelong Evolvable Systems (SecureChange)
2009-2012

There is growing demand to continuously evolve systems to meet changing business needs, new regulations and policies, novel technologies and computing infrastructures.
Unfortunately, the pace of required change affects our ability to ascertain and maintain the quality of a system. Our objective is thus to develop techniques and tools that ensure "lifelong" compliance to security, privacy and dependability requirements for a long-running evolving software system. This is challenging because these requirements are not necessarily preserved by system evolution.
The project will develop processes and tools that support design techniques for evolution, testing, verification, re-configuration and local analysis of evolving software. Our focus is on mobile devices and homes, which offer both great research challenges and long-term business opportunities.

Mogentes logo Model-based Generation of Tests for Dependable Embedded Systems (MOGENTES)
2008-2010

MOGENTES aims at significantly enhancing testing and verification of dependable embedded systems by means of automated generation of test cases relying on development of new approaches as well as innovative integration of state-of-the-art techniques. Driven by the needs of its industrial partners, it will address both testing of non-functional issues like reliability, e.g. by system stress and overload tests, and functional safety tests, meeting the requirements of standards such as IEC 61508, ISO WD 26262, or AUTOSAR. MOGENTES will demonstrate that different domains with a wide variety of requirements can significantly benefit from a common model-based approach for achieving automated generation of efficient test cases and for verifying system safety correctness using formal methods and fault injection, as this approach increases system development productivity while achieving predictable system dependability properties. For that purpose, proof-of-concept demonstrations will show the applicability of the developed technologies in two application domains: railway and automotive.
In particular, MOGENTES aims at the application of these technologies in large industrial systems, simultaneously enabling application domain experts (with rather little knowledge and experience in usage of formal methods) to use them with minimal learning effort. All in all, MOGENTES will increase knowledge and develop new techniques and tools in the area of verification and validation of dependable embedded systems which can be applied in model-based development processes also by non-experts in formal methods.

Mogentes

Amber logo Assessing, Measuring and Benchmarking Resilience (AMBER)
2008-2009

AMBER is a FP7 Coordination Action. It will bring together leading research teams on assessment, measurement, and benchmarking of resilience in computer systems in order to coordinate the effort of defining metrics and benchmarks for comparative evaluation of the resilience of computer systems and components. The consortium includes seven partners (universities of Coimbra, Budapest, City, Chalmers, Florence, and Newcastle and the company ResilTech) from five EU countries, which constitute core research groups on resilience assessment, and relies on a large and representative Advisory Board that constitutes the necessary link between the coordination action and the influential parties in industry and government, thus ensuring that the views of major stake-holders are being taken into account by the AMBER Consortium.
AMBER aims to coordinate the study of resilience measuring and benchmarking in computer systems and components, fostering European research in order to address the big challenges on resilience assessment posed by current and forthcoming computer systems and computer-based infrastructures.

Amber

Diana logo Distributed, equipment Independent environment for Advanced avioNic Applications (DIANA)
2006-2009

The DIANA Project is the first step for the implementation of an enhanced avionics platform, named AIDA (Architecture for Independent Distributed Avionics), providing secure distribution and execution on virtual machines to avionics applications. Along with this objective, DIANA also aims at contributing to the definition and standardization of the development and certification means needed to support this novel platform.
The introduction of the DIANA concepts is expected to bring a significant development cost and time reduction when compared to the situation where each aircraft electronic program has to develop a set of specific hardware and software. The usage of very promising technologies, such as CORBA and JAVA implementations in real time environment, and the update of standards will provide new opportunities to create the future IME architectures for the next generation of aircraft.

Sensoria logó Software Engineering in Service-Oriented Overlay Computers (SENSORIA)
2006-2009

Service-oriented computing is an emerging paradigm where services are understood as autonomous, platform-independent computational entities that can be described, published, categorised, discovered, and dynamically assembled for developing massively distributed, interoperable, evolvable systems and applications. These characteristics pushed service-oriented computing towards nowadays widespread success, demonstrated by the fact that many large companies invested a lot of efforts and resources to promote service delivery on a variety of computing platforms, mostly through the Internet in the form of Web services. Tomorrow, there will be a plethora of new services as required for e-government, e-business, and e-science, and other areas within the rapidly evolving Information Society.
The aim of SENSORIA is to develop a novel comprehensive approach to the engineering of software systems for service-oriented overlay computers where foundational theories, techniques and methods are fully integrated in a pragmatic software engineering approach. It will focus on global services that are context adaptive, personalisable, and may require hard and soft constraints on resources and performance, and will take into account the fact that services have to be deployed on different, possibly interoperating, global computers, to provide novel and reusable service-oriented overlay computers.

Sensoria

Decos logó Dependable Embedded Components and Systems (DECOS)
2004-2007

Decos car DECOS methodically targets, investigates, and develops approaches to significantly alleviate the identified five key obstacles - Electronic Hardware Cost, Diagnosis and Maintenance, Dependability, Development Cost, Intellectual Property (IP) Protection - to the deployment of advanced electronic functions in embedded systems. The intent is to provide an integrated distributed execution platform and a set of pre-validated hardware components and software modules and tools for the design of dependable embedded systems. Generic design solutions for integrated dependable systems will be developed such that the invariance of the design strategies and technology neutral interfaces are considered upfront as a design objective. System design approaches that are applicable to diverse application domains will be considered. DECOS targets automotive, aerospace, and control applications.

Former projects

 

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