R&D Projects

Current Projects

1- ACOSE (2012-2015) is a national project (Programme Investissements d'Avenir). The ACOSE project will develop a rigorous system development framework allowing the designed system to be represented at different levels of detail, from application software to its implementation on one or several platforms. ACOSE will address hardline issues such as complexity, separation of communication and computation, quality of service, correctness, model-based and component-based design, legacy integration, optimal power usage and industrial concerns such as integrated reporting. Such environment will allow SoC and system integrators putting in place a real strategy for product life cycle management.

2- ManyCoreLabs (2012-2015) is a national project (Programme Investissements d'Avenir).

3- CERTAINTY (2011-2013) is an European research project funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under the grant agreement number FP7- 99804. The goal of CERTAINTY is to be a key enabler of the certification process for mixed criticality embedded systems featuring functions dependent on information of varying confidence. Existing certification methods and tools do not properly address mixed criticality system "composition" and require a new approach to enable heterogeneous system layout while addressing changing resource availability. Strong segregation at design time is the current solution, resulting in performance limitations for complex applications that run on integrated architectures (e.g. IMA). Moreover, this approach is challenged in terms of performance/cost ratio by complex applications running on next generation architectures (many-core, multi-core).

4- ASCENS (2010-2014) is an European research project funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under the grant agreement number FP7-. The ASCENS approach will focus on service-component ensembles (SCEs), hierarchical ensembles built from service components (SCs), simpler SCEs and knowledge units (K) connected via highly dynamic infrastructure.

Service components are nodes that can cooperate, with different roles, in an open and non-deterministic environment. A service-component ensemble is a set of service components with dedicated knowledge units, to represent shared local and global knowledge basis about levels of awareness, resources, connectivity and networking, interconnected in a dynamic network, featuring goal-oriented, safe and secure execution and efficient resource management.

5- PRO3D (2009-2012) is an European research project funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under the grant agreement number FP7- 248776. PROD3D is an ambitious high risk and high reward project that builds upon existing European world-class R&D expertise of the partners. PRO3D will innovate in both hardware and software technologies and demonstrate the effectiveness of manycores by an integrated and concerted effort in key aspects of hardware and software design. The uniqueness of this proposal stems from the experience of the partners in various aspects of manycore design that need to be addressed concurrently.

The key outcome of PRO3D will be a holistic system design methodology to bring a drastic improvement of productivity to reduce cost development and time to market for future embedded computing. In particular, PROD3D will:

Develop a system software flow that can operate transparently on parallel manycore platforms;

Develop formal methods for software design guaranteeing the composability and correct operation of both hardware and software;

Explore the impact of 3D integration for new computing architectures;

Extend the software flow to 3D-stacked manycores.

6- SMECY (2010-2013) is an ARTEMIS project funded by the ARTEMISSIA Assiciation under the grant agreement number:. The joint goals of SMECY are to develop new programmable architectural solutions based on multi-core technology, and associated supporting tools in order to master complete system design of future smart multi-core embedded systems. All of this is strongly driven by the requirements and constraints from different application areas as well as the target platform. To be efficient the front-end / back-end take both the application requirements and the platform constraints into account. The hardware platforms and the development tools developed in the project will be demonstrated and evaluated for a certain set of representative applications provided by industrial partners of SMECY, such as radar systems, video/audio treatments and energy efficient wireless communication systems.

7- ACROSS (2010-2013) is an ARTEMIS project funded by the ARTEMISSIA Assiciation under the grant agreement number: ARTEMIS-2009-1-100208. The ACROSS project aims at achieving the following objectives:

An ACROSS-MPSoC that implements generic core services (e.g., deterministic communication, global time, diagnosis, fault and error containment) in an FPGA-based hardware for multiprocessor systems-on-a-chip (MPSoC)<\li>

design and implementation of generic optional services to be used in multiple application domains a general model-based design methodology, supported by appropriate adaptable tools, for the implementation and verification of ACROSS-based applications taking into account existing domain-specific models/tools

design and implementation of domain-specific optional services for the realization of embedded applications in the following domains: automotive, aerospace and industrial

Design and implementation of selected sample applications from the cited domains, which will show the benefits of using the ACROSS approach.

Past Projects

GENESYS (2008-2009) is an European research project funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under the grant agreement number FP7-213322.

COMBEST (COMponent-Based Embedded Systems design Techniques) is an European research project funded by the European Community's (2008-2010) under the grant agreement number ST STREP 215543.

COMBEST will provide a formal framework for component based design of complex embedded systems. This framework will:

Enable formal integration of heterogeneous components, such as with different models of communication or execution;

Provide complete encapsulation of components both for functional and extrafunctional properties and develop foundations and methods ensuring composability of components;

Enable prediction of emergent key system characteristics such as performance and robustness (timing, safety) from such characterizations of its subcomponents;

Provide certificates for guarantees of such key system characteristics when deployed on distributed HW-architectures.

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GOAC, is an European Space Agency- ESA project (2010-2012), in collaboration with GMV (Spain), ISTC-CNR (Italy) and LAAS. The Goal Oriented Autonomous Controller (GOAC) is an autonomous controller using a sense-plan-act paradigm to provide increasing levels of autonomy for robotic task achievement. Underlying GOAC is a rich representation that deals with metric time and resources necessary for dealing with planning and execution time uncertainty in dynamic environments. The system’s higher levels of abstraction deal with long-term mission plans that are deliberative; lower levels of abstraction are increasingly reactive.. Additionally a Verification and Validation system ensures compositional correctness by guaranteeing global system properties of system components.

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MARAE (Methode et Architecture Robuste pour l'Autonomie dans l'Espace), is an industrial project on robust methods to develop autonomous systems (2008-2010), in collaboration with ASTRIUM (EADS) and LAAS. This project is funded by FNRAE ("Fondation Nationale pour la Recherche en Aéronautique et l'Espace") MARAE is interested in the software architecture of spatial systems, such as monitoring satellites and autonomous robots.

AMAES is an ANR SSIA project in colaboration with LAAS and LIAFA (2005-2008). The objective of this project is to demonstrate some advances on the use of component-based construction for the development and the deployment of autonomous embedded systems (such as autonomous mobile rovers)

ADVANCE European community "Future and Emerging Technologies 2000-2003" project on Advanced Validation Technique Telecommunication Protocols

VIRES ESPRIT project "Verifying Industrial Reactive Systems 1997-2000" one of the main aims of which was the Verification of a wireless ATM protocol. See also VIRES Workshop, June 2000 in Autrans

Eprit-BRA Project REACT (1993-1996)