Section: Other Grants and Activities
National Grants
ANR Project “Architectures du Futur” - Multicriteria Optimizations for Real time Embedded systems (MORE)
Participants : Jonathan Ponroy, Olivier Zendra.
The MORE project begun in 2007. Gathering three Partners (LIP6 in Paris, IRIT in Toulouse, and INRIA-LORIA), it aims at developing trade-off strategies that transform the code of a critical embedded application so that it meets the system constraints in terms of worst-case execution time, code size and energy consumption. In a first stage, it will consist in analyzing the effects of a set of transformations (modifications of the control flow, code and data placement and compression, etc.) on the three criteria to identify their interactions. Then, an iterative optimization process will be set up, that will help in driving the selection of the transformations to apply according to measures carried on the system (through a simulator). An algorithm for searching trade-offs between the three criteria will decide among the collection of possible solutions produced by the iterative process. The third stage will consist in learning from the obtained results to propose new code transformations, with their hardware support, that would make it possible to reach more efficiently better trade-offs. The MORE project includes an experimental part that will necessitate to develop a software framework integrating measure tools, code transformation routines and a driver to implement the iterative optimization process and the trade-off search. in this project, INRIA-LORIA focuses on memory optimizations for energy under real time constraints.
ANR Open-PEOPLE - Open Power and Energy Optimization PLatform and Estimator
Participants : Sophie Alexandre, Kévin Roussel, Olivier Zendra.
Open-PEOPLE initially gathers 5 partners from academia and 2 from industry. This project aims at providing a federative and open platform for the estimation and optimization of power and energy consumption in computer systems. The platform users will be able to evaluate application consumption on a hardware architecture chosen among a set of provided typical, parametric architectures. In the considered system, the components will be picked from a library of hardware and software components, be they parametric or not. It will be possible to perform the estimation at various stages of the specification refinement, thanks to a methodology based on multi-level, interoperable and exchangeable consumption models allowing an easy exploration of the design space. Thus, estimations results may be used to check the energy behaviour of a system developed with simulation platforms. Feedback about the application functional properties will allow further refining of the estimation results in Open-PEOPLE. A standardisation of consumption models will be proposed in order to allow interoperability and have easier exchanges with other platforms. The Open-PEOPLE library of consumption models will be extendible: new component models will be added as the user applicative requirements evolve and as implementation techniques progress. To do so, the software estimation platform that will be accessible via an Internet portal shall be linked to a hardware platform made of an automated measurement testbench, which will be controllable from the software platform. A standalone version will also be provided to meet the confidentiality requirements of industry. A library of applications benchmarks will be proposed to characterize new components and new architectures. In addition to the research work required to build methods for multi-level estimation in heterogeneous complex systems, research work shall be carried on in order to offer new methods and techniques making it possible to optimize consumption thanks to the results provided by Open-PEOPLE. Open-PEOPLE is hence geared towards academia to support research work pertaining to consumption estimation and optimization methods, as well as towards industry to estimate or optimize the consumption of future products.
PRST MISN / Thème MIS: VITRAIL - Visualisation Temps Réel, Avancée et Immersive de Logiciels
Participants : Damien Bodenes, Pierre Caserta, Olivier Zendra.
The VITRAIL operation begun in 2009.
VITRAIL stems from the fact that software design and development still are very hand-made activities. Development tools almost uniquely consist of editors. Even advanced environments which allow a more graphical developments such as those based on UML, with "arrows and boxes", are limited by our 2D computer screens. VITRAIL's ultimate objective is to improve significantly the current practices in the design and development of programs. VITRAIL aims, by the creation of advanced, immersive software engineering techniques based on visualization, at allowing a better and faster understanding of software by their developers and maintainers. This will result in better quality, safety and optimality.
To do so, taking the opposite of current development techniques which are mainly based on text, VITRAIL intends to explode the limits that are pushed upon us when we visualize programs and their runs. We start from a very simple observation: the human field of vision only allows a precise view of a few degrees, but offer a (coarser) perception of about 180 degrees. Current computer screens only occupy about 45 degrees of the visual field are thus too limiting. We want to explode this limit, with a display that would fill the whole visual field of the developer, and even by putting directly the developer inside the program or its execution. We also want to provide the developer with a large amount of information, but with a simple, intuitive and easy to integrate way, thanks to metaphors. We believe this will enable a dramatically different approach of programs and a better understanding of their structure and behavior. Indeed the amount of information present in a program is huge and currently poorly presented. Making the understanding of this mass of information easy and quick is thus a very promising path. In addition we intend, on a longer term, in allowing the manipulation of programs in a much more natural way, by relying on body and gestures way beyond the mere fingers. all this in real time.
PREDIT Project - Systèmes Critiques pour l'Automobile : Robustesse des Logiciels Embarqués Temps-réel (SCARLET)
Participants : Liliana Cucu, Dorin Maxim, Nicolas Navet, Françoise Simonot-Lion.
This project proposed by the competitivity pole System@tic / Num@tec Automotive will be financed by ANR / PREDIT Program. It started in January 2007. The purpose of this project is to define methods and services that ensure the reliability of software COTS when integrating them in a critical embedded system. In SCARLET, TRIO is involved in tasks that aim to specify a methodology for the correct and optimal deployement of a real time system. A good input of this research were the works done by Ricardo Santos Marques during his PhD. In 2009, we mainly focused on sensivity analyses of a network configuration and on optimal deployment of the AUTOSAR communication stack on an ECU.
“Pôle de Compétitivité Alsace Franche-Comté” and FCE - CRISTAL Project
Participants : Adrien Guénard, Lionel Havet, Françoise Simonot-Lion.
The context of the CRISTAL project is a new transportation system for cities. The project gathers town planning consultants and scientifics. The role of the latter ones is to study an adaptive system of platooning, i.e. a system operating electrical vehicles under precise automatic control at close spacings to form a platoon. In particular, for TRIO, the challenge is to specify an optimal deployment of embedded functions that ensures by construction the safety properties required by the European regulation [30] . The LORIA research teams involved in this project are DEDALE, MAIA and TRIO. The partners are Lohr Industry, VU-log, Transitec.
ARA SSIA SAFE_NECS
Participants : Flavia Felicioni, Ning Jia, François Simonot, Françoise Simonot-Lion, Ye-Qiong Song.
Since December 2005, TRIO participates to the ARA SSIA Safe_NECS national project under ANR grant n° ANR-05-SSIA-015. The context of this project is the design of embedded systems whose function is the fault tolerant control of continuous process and whose implementation is done onto a distributed platform (Networked Control Systems). In particular, the project aims to develop a “co-design” approach that integrates in a coordinated way several kinds of parameters: the characteristics modelling the Quality of Control (QoC) as given by automatic control specialists, the dependability properties required on a system and the parameters of real time scheduling (tasks and messages). This year, we proposed several techniques for the co-design of control laws and scheduling strategies of tasks that implement them for a centralized architecture [8] , [29] .
GIS 3SGS: CONECS - Co-design Of NEtworked Control Systems
Participants : Laurent Ciarletta, Françoise Simonot-Lion, Ye-Qiong Song.
CONECS aims at developing a methodology of integrated codesign of dependable networked control systems. This approach should consider in a coordinated way the quality of control (QoC), the properties of dependability, and the task and message scheduling policies on the support system (processors and networks). It is a common project between LORIA and CRAN supported by GIS 3SGS (with Dominique Sauter of CRAN as the project coordinator). TRIO team has developed adaptive QoS control algorithms and on-line mechanisms in networks [40]
PRST MISN / Thème SSS: COWNECS - Co-design Of Wireless NEtworked Control Systems
Participants : Najet Boughanmi, Liliana Cucu-Grosjean, Françoise Simonot-Lion, Ye-Qiong Song.
COWNECS is a common project between LORIA (with Y.Q. Song as project coordinator), CRAN and LICM funded by Lorraine region as part of CPER SSS and SafeTech frameworks. Its aim is similar to that of CONECS but with a strong emphasize on the wireless network QoS adaptation for supporting dependable control applications. It is also complementary with CONECS by providing a platform to show the interest of our co-design approach. This platform is a high speed travelling crane with supervision, control and diagnostic through standard wireless networks (WiFi and Zigbee). For ensuring the quality of control and the dependability of such applications, we developed efficient on-line QoS mechanisms at MAC layer ([40] , [22] ).
