Stefan Petters was a prominent researcher at CISTER from 2009 until 2014. He was research line leader and also had the role of Vice-Director of CISTER. Stefan was an outstanding person, and his energy, wisdom, intelligence and team spirit were instrumental for the growth of CISTER-Labs. Stefan was a prominent member of the international community and his contributions will last long in the memories. Stefan sadly passed way last week, at the age of 50.

The Journal Paper entitled "Empirical Performance Models of MAC Protocols for Cooperative Platooning Applications", submitted by CISTER Researchers Pedro Miguel Santos and Luis Almeida is published in Electronics (MDPI).

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) enable vehicles to exchange information on traffic conditions, dynamic status and localization, to enhance road safety and transportation efficiency. A typical VANET application is platooning, which can take advantage of exchanging information on speed, heading and position to allow shorter inter-vehicle distances without compromising safety. However, the platooning performance depends drastically on the quality of the communication channel, which in turn is highly influenced by the medium access control protocol (MAC). Currently, VANETs use the IEEE 802. 11p MAC, which follows a carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) policy that is prone to collisions and degrades significantly with network load. This has led to recent proposals for a time-division multiple access (TDMA)-based MAC that synchronize vehicles' beacons to prevent or reduce collisions. In this paper, we take CSMA/CA and two TDMA-based overlay protocols, i.e., deployed over CSMA/CA, namely PLEXE-slotted and RA-TDMAp, and carry out extensive simulations with varying platoon sizes, number of occupied lanes and transmit power to deduce empirical models that provide estimates of average number of collisions per second and average busy time ratio. In particular, we show that these estimates can be obtained from observing the number of radio-frequency (RF) neighbours, i.e., number of distinct sources of the packets received by each vehicle per time unit. These estimates can enhance the online adaptation of distributed applications, particularly platooning control, to varying conditions of the communication channel.

On the 5th and 6th of September 2019, CISTER Researchers Luís Pinto and Miguel Gutiérrez Gaitán presented an oral communication and a poster at the 11th Symposium of Informatics (INForum 2019) held at the Campus Azurém of the University of Minho in Guimarães.

The article, also co-authored by CISTER members Pedro M. Santos and Luís Almeida, had the purpose of showing part of the research being done under the context of project AQUAMON, where CISTER is a partner.

In addition, the analysis presented in this work represents a relevant step on the support of real-time communications for over-water multi-hop networks affected by tides, which is one of the research challenges taken by Miguel in his Ph.D. studies.

Yoan Caille and Rochan Ramful, two undergrad students from ESIEE Paris, visited CISTER from May to July. Their work has been developed within the context of the FLEXIGY project, where they had developed algorithms for the scheduling of home appliances energy consumption on a local smart grid. These algorithms try to maximize the use of local production from Photovoltaic Panels or any other renewable sources.
Their internship was supported by the ERASMUS initiative.

On July 25, CISTER Researchers Geoffrey Nelissen and Konstantinos Bletsas participated to the technical programme committee meeting of the 40th IEEE Real-TIme Systems Symposium (RTSS 2019).

The TPC meeting took place in the offices of INRIA in Paris, France. RTSS is the premier international venue for real-time systems.

On the day before the TPC meeting, both researchers also attended the RTSOPS workshop. During the workshop, sixteen short talks on open problems on real-time systems were presented by recognized researchers from the real-time systems community.

CISTER Researchers Eduardo Tovar and Ali Awan attended the 25th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA 2019) in Hangzhou, China.

Eduardo Tovar was General Co-Chair and Steering Committee member and Ali Awan presented the paper entitled "Memory Bandwidth Regulation for Multiframe Task Sets" in the main conference.

It is the goal of the RTCSA to bring together researchers and developers from academia and industry to promote cross-fertilization and discuss advances and trends in the technology of embedded and real-time systems and their emerging applications, including the Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems.

On July 24, CISTER Researcher Cláudio Maia attended the final evaluation meeting for the KhronoSim project.
In this meeting two evaluators assessed the project in terms of achieved objectives and results. After careful evaluation and discussion, the project was deemed a success as all the objectives for the project were achieved, resulting in the development of two demonstrators for the KhronoSim test platform: an automotive instrument cluster and a satellite.
In the project, among other tasks, the CISTER team was responsible for studying the state of the art of emulation for multicore systems and integrating the KhronoSim test platform with the selected emulator. The emulator selected for the project was QEMU, one of the most versatile emulators currently available in the market, on top of which CISTER developed the KhronoSim QEMU Module that allows one to instance, manage and control, via the KhronoSim platform, several QEMU instances.

P.Porto received, on June 27th, the event entitled H2020: Infoday Digital Transformation, promoted by the National Innovation Agency (ANI), together with the Polytechnic Institute of Porto (P.Porto), TICE.PT and ISCTE-IUL.
The session was attended by Lars Pedersen from DG CONNECT, European Commission, who gave a presentation on the latest H2020 calls that will support digital transformation.
CISTER Research Centre premises were the venue for the event "Eyes on Horizon Europe: How to look at opportunities in crossover areas such as Space and ICT" in which several researchers had the opportunity to discuss possible application topics to be completed by the end of the H2020 program in order to promote national participation in the European research program, particularly in the area of ICT (Information and Communications Technology)."

CISTER was involved in the Conference on Coordination Models and Languages (Coordination 2019), the top venue in the community that investigates abstractions that cleanly separate behaviour from communication, therefore increasing modularity, simplifying reasoning, and ultimately enhancing software development. Coordination is one of the three conferences of DisCoTec - one of the major events sponsored by IFIP, on distributed computing techniques.
Its 21st edition took place in Copenhagen, 19-21 June 2019, where the CISTER researcher José Proença participated in the Steering Committee meeting to discuss the future of the conference, and presented his work on coordination on a real-time operating system.

On the 11th of June, CISTER Researchers David Pereira and Giann Nandi have participated in a progress meeting of REASSURE, that took place in the premises of the Department of Informatics of University of Minho.
The meeting, which counted also with the participation of REASSURE’s team members José Bacelar Almeida and Jorge Sousa Pinto from HASLab/ INESC TEC, had the purpose of analyzing the results obtained by both teams in this first year of REASSURE, and to plan the next steps for the second year of activities of the project, notably in what concerns the design of Domain Specific Languages and Cyber-Security Support in the design of runtime monitoring architectures.

Particular focus on the work developed by Giann, under his PhD studies, on the formal verification of WSN protocols using the ProVerif Tool, which is the core result described in the paper entitled “Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: A formal verification of protocols” that has been recently accepted in this year’s edition of INDIN 2019 – 17th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics.

Last 20th of May, at the ENSEEIHT in Toulouse, CISTER Vice-Director Luis Almeida participated in the HDR examination (Habilitation à Diriger de Recherche) of Luca Santinelli, a well-known member of the real-time systems community, based at ONERA, working essentially on probabilistic methods for the estimation of the worst-case execution and response times.
The examination focused on the research path of the candidate and his research perspectives for the future.
Beyond Luis Almeida, the examination committee included Alan Burns U.York,UK; Isabelle Puaut, U.Rennes, FR; Laurent George, ECE, FR; Yves Sorel, INRIA, FR; Joel Goossens, ULB, BE and Christian Fraboul, U.Toulouse, FR.
 

The first VORTEX General Assembly was held at the CISTER Labs on the 8th of May, alongside with VORTEX Bootcamp.
This first General Assembly was mainly to ratify changes in the association bylaws proposed by the supervisory board, to name the members of the assembly and elect members of the VORTEX Scientific Council.
After discussing the overall charter and proposed changes, the assembly approved by unamity those changes.
The General Assembly is thus constituted by Jaime Medeiros - President (Altran/CRALaw); Nuno Correia - Secretary (NOVALINCS/UNL) and Paulo Gandra de Sousa - Secretary (CISTER/ISEP).
CISTER Researchers David Pereira and Ricardo Severino were appointed as members of the VORTEX Scientific Council and Eduardo Tovar was appointed as President of the VORTEX Scientific Council.
After this formality, the assembly members discussed about the future of the association based on the briefing of the bootcamp.

Tomás Corrêa gave a talk on “Digital Communications for the Control of Modular Multilevel Converters” on the 19th of March, at CISTER/FEUP. Tomás is a PhD student at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares in Spain and started by explaining the concept of Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) and how it impacted the conversion and control of electrical energy at high voltage levels. MMCs, invented in 2001, are composed of a potentially large number of power modules, as known as cells, that are stacked and switched on and off individually to generate a voltage wave with a desired shape, typically sinusoidal. The cells are controlled centrally but individual connections to the controller can limit scalability and hinder MMCs applicability. Thus, Tomas focused on the current trend toward using digital communications in MMCs and told us about the benefits and challenges this trend implies, particularly concerning the trade-off between latency, reliability and cost. Among different alternatives, Ethernet technology connected in a ring topology stands up, currently, as the best compromise essentially due to the high reliability-cost ratio and despite the relatively high latency it implies. Tomas shared with us, then, his research on Ethernet-based ring networks to bring latency to a minimum, designing specific protocols, namely TTRing and DiSortNet, for specific distributions of the MMC control, that reduce by one half the best latency achievable with current COTS technology, supporting 400 nodes with cycle times below 200us.

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FLEXIGY project aims at creating a Virtual Energy Community concept that will operate “behind the meters” – i.e. the development of flexibility management services to allow energy aggregators to involve energy resources with private bilateral contracts, thus enabling the use of distributed energy resources in a collaborative way, with significantly larger community benefits when compared to individual optimization, supported by a cyber-physical infrastructure required to support load flexibility management with community-wide optimization mechanisms (which includes storage management, production management and load management), thus ensuring the security and satisfaction levels for the economic viability of the proposed solution. In this project energy transactions will be based on the blockchain concept and virtual currencies, in order to increase trust and end-user engagement.
In this meeting Luis Lino Ferreira and Rafael Rocha presented their work on the Flex Offer concept and discussed with the other partners the architecture for the system.
 

Ramiro Robles represented CISTER/ISEP in the F2F technical board meeting of the project SCOTT held at the premises of our partner NXP in Munich, Germany on the 7th of February 2019.
This meeting was mainly focused on how the different WPs and Technology lines of the project will answer the comments of the reviewers provided in the official feedback after the first year of the project. In addition, the meeting was also focused on refining the impact and exploitation definition of the project highlighting the main measurable outcomes expected of the project and how we will achieve the target values.
CISTER/ISEP acted as the chair of the technical board, leader of the reference architecture of the project and representative of the aeronautics domain.
 

During the last month four new PhD students joined CISTER.

Hajar and Amir from Iran, Ênio from Brasil and Jingjing from China, are already aiming their brain power at the next three years, in which they will be doing research in topics such as reliable 5G communications, cooperative autonomous control, and multiprocessor platforms for embedded safety critical systems.

Hajar Baghcheband was born in Shiraz, Iran. She received the B.Sc. in computer software engineering from IAU of Shiraz and the M.Sc. degrees in the field of Information Technology from Graduate University of Advanced Technology (GUAT). Her master thesis was granted by Iran Telecommunications Research Center (ITRC) and focused on applying data mining techniques to intrusion detection system. Since 2009, she was lecturer at higher education institutes and colleges of Shiraz.
In 2016, her new role in company as project management and database administrator started which their project shortlisted for World Summit Award.
Since September 2018, Hajar started to pursue her education toward PhD in Computer Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. Her research interests are Machine Learning, Multi agent System, Artificial Intelligence, Data mining, Business Intelligence, Decision Support system and Database.

Amir Hossein Farzamiyan was born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1985. He received both the B.Sc. and the M.Sc. degrees in the field of Electrical and Electronic engineering. He is a graduate with strong communication and organizational skills gained in his study, research and work experience in communication networks and Wireless Communication, now seeking to pursue his study toward PhD in the field of telecommunication.
His research interests are Wireless (Radio) Access Networks, 5G Networks, Internet of Things, Software Defined Network, Advanced Wireless Communications, Cyber-Security, Network Packet Routing Protocol, Network Topology.

Ênio Filho was born in 1984 in Brazil. He has a BSc degree in Automation and Control (2006) and a MSc degree in Mechatronics Systems (2012) both from Universidade de Brásilia (UnB). He is an assistant professor at Instituto Federal de Goiás (IFG), in Brazil.
He is pursuing a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (PDEEC).His biggests interests are in autonomous vehicles, communication networks and artificial intelligence in real time applications.

Jingjing Zheng was born in 1991 in Hubei, China. From a very young age he showed enormously passionate about computers and mathematics. During his college years, he participated in China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling three times, and obtained the Second Prize in Jiangxi Province, the First Prize in Jiangxi Province, the Second Prize in the Nation, respectively.
In 2015 he began to study Control Science and Engineering at the Guangdong University of Technology, where he had done the master thesis of Research on Resource Allocation and Multi-agent Co-optimization for Dynamic Heterogeneous Multi-core Processors, and having obtained a good result through peer reviews. After, he received the M.S.degree from Guangdong University of Technology, China, in June 2018.
Currently his research interests are in Real Time Embedded Systems, Multi-core processors and Optimization Algorithm.
 

Robert I. Davis gave a distinguished seminar on "Transferring Real-Time Systems Research into Industrial Practice"
During this talk, Dr Robert I. Davis discussed two impact case studies where real-time systems research has been successfully transferred into industrial practice. In each case, the technology created was translated into viable commercial products and led to significant advances in the automotive electronics and avionics domains, providing substantial returns on investment for the companies using the technology.

Robert I. Davis is a Reader in the Real-Time Systems Research Group at the University of York, UK. Robert received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of York in 1995. Since then he has founded three start-up companies, all of which have succeeded in transferring real-time systems research into commercial products. Robert’s research interests include the following aspects of real-time systems: scheduling algorithms and analysis for single processor, multiprocessor and networked systems; analysis of cache related pre-emption delays, mixed criticality systems, and probabilistic hard real-time systems.

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Stefano Zanero from Politecnico Di Milano presented a talk on “Breaking the Laws of Robotics: Attacking Industrial Robots”, where he discussed vulnerabilities of industrial robots and the work achieved by his research group to address potential attacks. Stefano presented a recent attack performed by his students to alter the precision of an industrial robot which can lead to potential harm to products and even users. Various use cases were discussed including an attack via insecure web interfaces, weak authentication protocols, exposure of industrial routers, etc. The impact of existing domain specific languages in this area was also discussed during this talk. More information around this work is available at robosec.org.

Stefano Zanero received a PhD in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, where he is currently an associate professor. His research focuses on malware analysis, cyberphysical security, and cybersecurity in general. Besides teaching "Computer Security" and "Computer Forensics" at Politecnico, he has an extensive speaking and training experience in Italy and abroad. He co-authored over 70 scientific papers and books. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE (for which he sits on the MGA board), the IEEE Computer Society (for which he is a member of the Board of Governors), and a lifetime senior member of the ACM. Stefano co-founded the Italian chapter of ISSA (Information System Security Association). He has been named a Fellow of ISSA and sits in its International Board of Directors. Stefano is also a co-founder and chairman of Secure Network, a leading information security consulting firm based in Milan and in London; a co-founder of 18Months, a cloud-based ticketing solutions provider; and a co-founder of BankSealer, a startup in the FinTech sector that addresses fraud detection through machine learning techniques.

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