Addressing the Smart Systems Design Challenge: The SMAC Platform

This article presents the concepts, the organization, and the preliminary application results of SMAC, a smart systems co-design platform. The SMAC platform, which has been developed as Integrated Project (IP) of the 7th ICT Call under the Objective 3.2 \u201cSmart components and Smart Systems integration\u201d addresses the challenges of the integration of heterogeneous and conflicting domains that emerge in the design of smart systems. SMAC includes methodologies and EDA tools enabling multi-disciplinary and multi-scale modelling and design, simulation of multidomain systems, subsystems and components at different levels of abstraction, system integration and exploration for optimization of functional and non-functional metrics. The article presents the preliminary results obtained by adopting the SMAC platform for the design of a limb tracking smart system

Architectural Concept and Evaluation of a Framework for the Efficient Automation of Computational Scientific Workflows: An Energy Systems Analysis Example

Scientists and engineers involved in the design of complex system solutions use computational workflows for their evaluations. Along with growing system complexity, the complexity of these workflows also increases. Without integration tools, scientists and engineers are often highly concerned with how to integrate software tools and model sets, which hinders their original research or engineering aims. Therefore, a new framework for streamlining the creation and usage of automated computational workflows is introduced in the present article. It uses state-of-the-art technologies for automation (e.g., container-automation) and coordination (e.g., distributed message oriented middleware), and a microservice-based architecture for novel distributed process execution and coordination. It also supports co-simulations as part of larger workflows including additional auxiliary computational tasks, e.g., forecasting or data transformation. Using Apache NiFi, an easy-to-use web interface is provided to create, run and control workflows without the need to be concerned with the underlying computing infrastructure. Initial framework testing via the implementation of a real-world workflow underpins promising performance in the realms of parallelizability, low overheads and reliable coordination