Running Research Projects where I am involved in

OPEES - Open Platform for the Engineering of Embedded Systems
(EUREKA-ITEA2 project, 01/01/2009-31/12/2012) in cooperation with Space Application Services (Belgium), Adacore (France), Airbus (France), Alyotech (France), Atos Origin (France), CEA LIST (France), CNES (France), Combitech (Sweden), CS (France), Dassault Aviation (France), EADS Astrium Satellites (France), EADS Astrium Space Transportation (France), Ericsson (Sweden), ICT Norway (Norway), Indra Sistemas (Spain), Innovalia Association (Spain), INPT-IRIT (France), INRIA (France), Linagora (France), MBDA (France), OBEO (France), ONERA (France), SQS (Spain), TCP (Spain) Tecnalia-ESI (Spain), Thales (France), University of Skövde (Sweden) UPV (Spain), Xipp (France)

The mission statement of OPEES is to settle a community and build the necessary means and enablers to ensure long-term availability of innovative engineering technologies in the domain of dependable / critical software-intensive embedded systems. For OPEES partners and supporters, this challenge can be achieved if we succeed in building an ecosystem in the open source frame, with the relevant business models, in order to ensure this long term availability of engineering tools and components.

The viability of such an ecosystem requires several elements that the OPEES project aims at providing:

• An open and visible organization with an European and world-wide dimension, implementing the business models / business plan and dissemination plan defined in the project, allowing the emergence of a European service industry able to create profitable business and employment,
• a common vision and roadmap which allows to share and build upon the results of R&D collaborative projects and to ensure consistency and complementarities for the future R&D projects that will be launched to complete the set of engineering tools,
• An open technical repository that will hold a first set of core components & tools matured and assessed following the OPEES methodologies, and will support collaborative works around these components,
• A set of processes and guidelines for tools/components maturation, verification & qualification, for the candidate tools/components validated through experimentations on real use cases to ensure components durability and interoperability, through promotion of open standards, in adequacy with industrial needs, constraints and domain standards.

SPARC - Smart Plug-in Automobile Renewable Charging Services
(IBBT-ICON project, 01/01/2011-31/12/2012) in cooperation with Athlon Car Lease, Interparking, REstore, Sony, Stad Brugge, VITO, IBBT-ESAT-KU Leuven, IBBT-IBCN-UGent, IBBT-MICT-UGent, IBBT-SMIT-VUB (Belgium)

Worldwide, governments are starting to give incentives to promote the use of (hybrid) electrical vehicles to achieve cleaner and more energy-efficient road transport with a low carbon footprint. Through tax/VAT reductions and free additional services, such as free parking, free battery charging or lower traffic congestion taxes, private users, public organizations and car fleet operators are stimulated to adopt the plug-in (hybrid) electrical car. While the first charge stations are being deployed, and the autonomy of batteries are being evaluated, still a number of challenges remain to be addressed e.g. how to optimize the charging process in favor of renewable, fluctuating energy sources, and how to obtain seamless driver (or car) identification and fraud-sensitive measuring of the charged energy (anywhere a car is charged).

Within this project, it is the aim of plug-in electrical vehicle operators (e.g. car and battery leasing companies) and car parking providers (e.g. private parking companies) to jointly address novel services that should allow to bring the electrical vehicle to a first critical mass of end-users: (1) services for fraud-sensitive measuring and billing of battery charging and (2) services for optimized, coordinated battery charging of large groups of cars using a maximum of renewable energy. These novel ICT services will have to plug into the smart power grid architecture, and therefore an extendable service deployment architecture is required that allows service components to be distributed across home gateways, vehicles, public charge stations and the back-end systems of PHEV operators and smart grid operators. This project therefore explicitly addresses the definition of a novel service architecture ? which offers OEM-independent battery charging services exploiting ongoing standardization efforts - and targets a proof-of-concept demonstration of the underlying ICT architectures, smart charging algorithms and user-friendly interfaces.

Running Research Projects where I am partially involved in

PUMA - Permissions, User Management and Availability for Multi-tenant SaaS Applications
(IBBT-ICON project, 01/01/2012-31/12/2013) in cooperation with Unified Post, Wondergraphs, SIMAC 3 Services, IBBT-IBCN-UGent,IBBT-COSIC-KU Leuven (Belgium).

Cloud computing offers enterprises and consumers flexible access to shared computing on a infrastructure level (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), platform level (Platform-as-a-Service) and software level (Software-as-a-Service).

Software-as-a-Service applications are typically shared by multiple customers that preferably use the same application software and the same distributed installation and execution environment. Each customers has many user types in (and outside of) his own organization that need to be supported and verified to ensure correct usage of the application.

A suitable access control mechanism needs to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability of the SaaS application as a whole. And it is of key importance that the right performance and scaling measures are taken to guarantee the permanent availability of all instances of the application in the shared distributed environment.

PUMA aims to develop a scalable security solution for the management and enforcement of user permissions for Software-as-a-Service applications in a shared (multi-tenant) infrastructure. This solution offers support for essential security requirements, such as confidentiality, integrity and availability.