Interplay of Security&Dependability and Resource using Model-driven and Pattern-based Development

International audienceSeveral frameworks have been proposed to help designers of embedded system applications. However, we currently lack methodological tool support to take into account the interplay between security&;dependability and resource properties. In this work, we propose a modeling environment which associates model-driven paradigms with security and dependability patterns to ensure that the combination of security and dependability solutions fit on the targeted hardware platform. The resulted framework will serve as a tool to estimate the resources consumed by the security and dependability solutions at early stages of design to help the designer to avoid resource conflicts at run-time. In addition, we provide an architecture for development tools to support the design and the analysis of pattern-based secure and dependable applications. Finally, we apply it in practice to a use case from railway domain with strong security and dependability requirements

Pairing a Circular Economy and the 5G-Enabled Internet of Things: Creating a Class of “Looping Smart Assets”

The increase in the world’s population has led to a massive rise in human consumption of the planet’s natural resources, well beyond their replacement rate. Traditional recycling concepts and methods are not enough to counter such effects. In this context, a circular economy (CE), that is, a restorative and regenerative by-design economy, can reform today’s “take–make–dispose” economic model. On the other hand, the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to gradually transform our everyday lives, allowing for the introduction of novel types of services while enhancing legacy ones. Taking this as our motivation, in this article we analyze the CE/IoT interplay, indicating innovative ways in which this interaction can drastically affect products and services, their underlying business models, and the associated ecosystems. Moreover, we present an IoT architecture that enables smart object integration into the IoT ecosystem. The presented architecture integrates circularityenabling features by maximizing the exploitation of assets toward a new type of IoT ecosystem that is circular by design (CbD). Finally, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation and an application study of the proposed architecture and results regarding the applicability of the proposed approach for the telecommunications (telecom) sector

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

CIRCE: Architectural Patterns for Circular and Trustworthy By-Design IoT Orchestrations

The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, applications and services gradually transform our everyday lives. In parallel, the transition from linear to circular economic (CE) models provide an even more fertile ground for novel types of services, and the update and enrichment of legacy ones. To fully realize the potential of the interplay between IoT and CE, the design-time definition of IoT orchestrations with proven circularity properties, and the run-time management of these orchestrations based on said properties, is of paramount importance. Nevertheless, the circularity requirements and associated properties are not only difficult to achieve at the IoT orchestration design and deployment initialization phases, but also hard to prove and maintain at run-time. Motivated by this, this paper presents the CIRCE framework for circular and trustworthy by-design IoT orchestrations. The CIRCE approach leverages concepts from pattern-driven engineering, whereby patterns are used to encode proven dependencies between the Location, Condition, and Availability (LCA) properties of individual smart objects and corresponding properties of orchestrations (compositions) involving them. These are augmented by patterns encoding trustworthiness-related properties, namely Connectivity, Security, Privacy, Dependability, and Interoperability (CSPDI). Thereby, these patterns are used to generate IoT orchestrations with proven LCA and CSPDI properties, as needed, at design time. At runtime, these properties are monitored in real-time, leveraging reasoning engines deployed across system layers, triggering adaptations to return the deployed orchestration to the desired LCA and CSPDI states, when required. Details are provided on the above novel combination of IoT, CE and pattern-based engineering, along with a proposed architecture and implementation approach. Furthermore, an assessment of a proof-of-concept implementation is provided, validating the feasibility of the proposed approach

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

Engineering secure systems: Models, patterns and empirical validation

Several development approaches have been proposed to handle the growing complexity of software system design. The most popular methods use models as the main artifacts to construct and maintain. The desired role of such models is to facilitate, systematize and standardize the construction of software-based systems. In our work, we propose a model-driven engineering (MDE) methodological approach associated with a pattern-based approach to support the development of secure software systems. We address the idea of using patterns to describe solutions for security as recurring security problems in specific design contexts and present a well-proven generic scheme for their solutions. The proposed approach is based on metamodeling and model transformation techniques to define patterns at different levels of abstraction and generate different representations according to the target domain concerns, respectively. Moreover, we describe an operational architecture for development tools to support the approach. Finally, an empirical evaluation of the proposed approach is presented through a practical application to a use case in the metrology domain with strong security requirements, which is followed by a description of a survey performed among domain experts to better understand their perceptions regarding our approach

Non-functional properties in the model-driven development of service-oriented systems

Systems based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles have become an important cornerstone of the development of enterprise-scale software applications. They are characterized by separating functions into distinct software units, called services, which can be published, requested and dynamically combined in the production of business applications. Service-oriented systems (SOSs) promise high flexibility, improved maintainability, and simple re-use of functionality. Achieving these properties requires an understanding not only of the individual artifacts of the system but also their integration. In this context, non-functional aspects play an important role and should be analyzed and modeled as early as possible in the development cycle. In this paper, we discuss modeling of non-functional aspects of service-oriented systems, and the use of these models for analysis and deployment. Our contribution in this paper is threefold. First, we show how services and service compositions may be modeled in UML by using a profile for SOA (UML4SOA) and how non-functional properties of service-oriented systems can be represented using the non-functional extension of UML4SOA (UML4SOA-NFP) and the MARTE profile. This enables modeling of performance, security and reliable messaging. Second, we discuss formal analysis of models which respect this design, in particular we consider performance estimates and reliability analysis using the stochastically timed process algebra PEPA as the underlying analytical engine. Last but not least, our models are the source for the application of deployment mechanisms which comprise model-to-model and model-to-text transformations implemented in the framework VIATRA. All techniques presented in this work are illustrated by a running example from an eUniversity case study

An Optimization Based Design for Integrated Dependable Real-Time Embedded Systems

Moving from the traditional federated design paradigm, integration of mixedcriticality software components onto common computing platforms is increasingly being adopted by automotive, avionics and the control industry. This method faces new challenges such as the integration of varied functionalities (dependability, responsiveness, power consumption, etc.) under platform resource constraints and the prevention of error propagation. Based on model driven architecture and platform based design’s principles, we present a systematic mapping process for such integration adhering a transformation based design methodology. Our aim is to convert/transform initial platform independent application specifications into post integration platform specific models. In this paper, a heuristic based resource allocation approach is depicted for the consolidated mapping of safety critical and non-safety critical applications onto a common computing platform meeting particularly dependability/fault-tolerance and real-time requirements. We develop a supporting tool suite for the proposed framework, where VIATRA (VIsual Automated model TRAnsformations) is used as a transformation tool at different design steps. We validate the process and provide experimental results to show the effectiveness, performance and robustness of the approach