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EuroCloud in Advisory board of FlepCos

A flexible Cloud based Interoperability Framework for IoT and CPS Platforms – FlepCos

Modern society relies more and more on automated services utilising the increased proliferation of embedded sensors and mobile devices. This creates new business and societal opportunities, specifically considering the innovation potential of smart devices as peripheral elements integrated within an open framework that improves information flows and increases the efficiency and resource usage of distributed physical and IT services. For these opportunities to materialise it is necessary to create a platform in which composable flexible and secure services for IoT- Smart-* and big data applications alike are integrated. Such services rely on information exchange and collection of data from peripheral and edge components. A flexible backend (e.g. based on Cloud services) can then be used as logical central data processing points, which offer scalable and flexible services. Numerous platforms and service components exist in both, the peripheral domain and the cloud backend. Example projects, represented by FLEPCOS partners that looked into specific aspects of related domains are Arrowhead, FIWARE, the Hadoop ecosystem and Wisebed.
To leverage the advantages existing platforms offer and to make full use of their potential it is therefore necessary to develop a cloud-based interoperability framework in which technologies and methods as well as related interdisciplinary research issues can be addressed (see Research Objectives). The overall vision is for this to enable interoperability within systems used in IoT, CPS and Big Data application scenarios, and also interoperability between independent systems of individual scenarios. This requires novel research approaches for describing such systems. An existing approach which would be subject to extension and adaption are Tectons. They are distributed abstractions to support the programmatic composition of autonomous “systems”, to generate inter-operable systems-of-systems.
Outputs of FlepCos are anticipated to facilitate novel marketplaces of services by allowing space for different stakeholders: e.g. “infrastructure providers” can offer low-level tectons to “service providers” who compose tectons to provide higher level tectons that are of interest to various specialized constituencies of “users” via structure or opportunistic approaches.

To demonstrate the potential and challenges of this concept the projects adopts a Use Case based approach. This is based on, first, independent use cases between which interoperability will be enabled in a second stage: UC 1 (ETRA/AIT): Smart-city focuses on public transport for which various sensor distributed over the Spanish region of Catalonia are collecting data which will be connected to a cloud infrastructure in which services are being operated to improve security and efficiency of the operations. On-demand based policies are used to improve the performance of the analysis and optimization services. The interoperability framework will support the centralized collection of various sensor data in a scalable environment. On top of this environment, a big-data application will be developed that supports data provisioning and analysis. This will support the public administration of the local area in deriving temporal usage patterns of the services using a scalable data analytics platform provided by the backend infrastructure. UC 2 (Comtrade): Secure data sharing for public Administration, allows public administration bodies (e.g. security services) to share data in real-time with corresponding counter parts. This data sharing also enables citizens to participate in public administration via sharing sensor data as well as images from their smart-phones. UC 3(OTE): National weather service uses smart devices with weather sensors to collect and provide close to real-time information in specific geographical areas. The idea is to crowdsource meteorological data. Through this UC the potential of crowdsourcing significant amounts of relevant data through standard devices can be demonstrated. The backend (a Cloud infrastructure) is then responsible for selecting, validating and processing the data. The challenge of all use cases is the integration of public data sources in critical infrastructure elements.

Research Objectives

1. Interoperability Framework and Design for federated advanced and flexible infrastructures
   1. Describing Interfaces for heterogeneous resources, components and platforms
   2. Component interoperability and open platforms (e.g. monitoring modules, pub/sub, data sharing, secure storage, authentication, communication middleware, self-* application support, big data application support, virtualisation modules and infrastructure)
   3. Integration methods for resources and modules into framework and applications with the framework, including abstraction approaches to support compositions (based on tectons)

2. Enhanced Security and Resilience in interoperable environments in devices, resources and framework
   1. End to end Security (network/transport & platform security)
   2. Service, Virtual Infrastructure and Network Resilience
   3. Methods for assurance and trust support

3. Resource Management, Services Orchestration and Data Brokerage
   1. Distributed orchestration and management - Following autonomic management principles
   2. Requirement driven control of processing and resource allocation - User, commercial and legal aspects
   3. Interfaces and concepts for data market place considering trust boundaries …

4. Business, Techno-Legal and Socio-technical Issues
   1. Investigation of Future Business Models for IoT, Smart-* and Big Data Applications
   2. Need for novel governance approaches for federated service composition setups
   3. User-acceptance, User-friendliness and misuse prevention via socio-technical means

5. Realistic Use Cases in multiple significantly different domains
   1. Smart-City / Transport
   2. Smart Government and Public Services
   3. Weather Sensors

Project Meta Data

RTO & Academic Institutions

1. AIT (AT), www.ait.ac.at
2. ULANC (UK), www.lancaster.ac.uk
3. USTA (UK), www.st-andrews.ac.uk
4. KIT (DE), www.kit.edu/english/
5. BME (HU), www.bme.hu
6. TUG (AT), www.egiz.gv.at
7. TiU (NL), www.tilburguniversity.edu

Industrial Partners

1. COMT (RS), www.comtrade.com
2. ETRA (ES), www.etra.es
3. IFX (DE), www.infineon.de
4. ATOS (ES), es.atos.net/es-es/home.html
5. OTE (GR), www.ote.gr/web/guest
6. EMC(IE), ireland.emc.com/index.htm
7. AITIA (HU) www.aitia.ai

Public adminstiration Stakeholders

1. Municipality of Tarragona (ES)
2. Municipality of Vrilissia (Athen) (GR)

• Duration 3,5 Years
• Work Packages:
  
  • WP1 Project management
  • WP2 Use Cases and Requirements
  • WP3 Framework and Meta- Design
  • WP4 Security, Privacy, Trust and Resilience
  • WP5 Resource Broker and Orchestration
  • WP6 Business, Techno-legal and Socio-technical issues
  • WP7 Demonstration
  • WP8 Dissemination and Exploitation

• Large Scale Demo
• Planned Budget 7MioEUR
  
• Large Contribution
  

Contact Information

Dr. Markus G. Tauber, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH 2444 Seibersdorf, Austria
M +43 (0) 664 8251011, markus.tauber@ait.ac.at
Mr. Christian Wagner, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH 2444 Seibersdorf, Austria
M+ 43 (0) 664 6207838 christian.wagner@ait.ac.at