While online grocery stores are expanding, supermarkets continue to provide customers with the sensory experience of choosing goods while walking between display shelves. Therefore, retail and logistics companies are concerned with making the shopping experience more comfortable and exciting while, at the same time, using technology to reduce costs and improve efficiency. The REFILLS project aims at developing robotic systems able to address the in-store logistics needs of the retail market. Three scenarios building on top of each other are considered. In the 1st scenario, mobile robots inspect shelves and generate semantic environment maps for layout identification and store monitoring. The 2nd scenario employs robot arms for autonomous sorting of articles in the backroom and for assisting human clerks with shelf refilling in the shop. In the 3rd scenario, the autonomy of the robot is strengthened, resulting in a robotic clerk capable of manipulating articles varying in shape, surface, fragility, stiffness and weight, and refill shelves without human intervention. These scenarios trigger a number of research and technology challenges that are tackled within REFILLS. Information on the supermarket articles is exploited to create powerful knowledge bases, which are used by the robots to identify shelves, recognize missing or misplaced articles, handling them and navigate the shop. Reasoning allows robots to cope with changing task requirements and contexts, and perception-guided reactive control makes them robust to execution errors and uncertainty. A modular approach is adopted for the design of cost-efficient robotic units. The work plan will generate exploitable results through three integration and evaluation phases. A final demonstration will take place at a real retail store. In sum, REFILLS is committed to generating wide impact in the retail market domain and beyond through the development of efficient logistics solutions for professional use in supermarkets.

Currently cloud infrastructures are mostly homogeneous -- composed of a large number of machines of the same type -- centrally managed and made available to the end user using the three standard delivery models: Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). As clouds increase in size and as machines of different types are added to the infrastructure in order to maximise performance and power efficiency, heterogeneous clouds are being created. However, exploiting different architectures such as graphics processing units, many integrated cores and data flow engines, poses significant challenges.To efficiently access heterogeneous resources and, at the same time, to exploit these resources to reduce application development effort, to make optimisations easier and to simplify service deployment requires a reevaluation of our approach to service delivery. The evolving complexity of the cloud ecosystem will eventually render traditional cloud management techniques ineffectual. Self-organisation and self-management are powerful techniques for managing complexity. Some of our initial simulation results using self organisation and self optimisation indicate that these can be used as the basis of a new cloud management and delivery model capable of efficiently dealing with issues that arise at scale. Our preliminary work has centred on promoting access to power efficient heterogeneous resources by shifting the deployment and optimization effort from the consumer to the software stack running on the cloud infrastructure. With CloudLightning, we propose to extend this work and to build a cloud management and delivery infrastructure based on these principles. Given the prohibitive expense associated with empirical experimentation on hyperscale cloud infrastructures, data gathered on our testbed will be used to simulate this infrastructure and to evaluate the self organisation approach in that context.

MIKELANGELO is a project, targeted to disrupt the core underlying technologies of Cloud computing, enabling even bigger uptake of Cloud computing, HPC in the Cloud and Big Data technologies under one umbrella. The vision of MIKELANGELO is to improve responsiveness, agility and security of the virtual infrastructure through packaged applications, using lean guest operating system OSv and superfast hypervisor SuperKVM. In short, the work will concentrate on improvement of virtual I/O in KVM, using additional virtio expertise, integrated with the light-weight operating system OSv and with enhanced Security. The HPC in the Cloud focus will be provided through involvement of a large HPC centre, with the ability and business need to cloudify their HPC business. The Consortium consists of hand-picked experts (e.g., the original creator of KVM - Avi Kivity) who participate in the overall effort to reduce one of the last performance hurdles in the virtualisation (I/O). Other layers of inefficiency are addressed through OSv (thin operating system) and all packaged under the OpenStack or OpenNebula. Such approach will allow for use of MIKELANGELO stack on heterogeneous infrastructures, with high responsiveness, agility and better security. The targeted audience are primarily SMEs (e.g. simulation dependent SMEs). Finally, the use-cases have clear owners, thus directly contributing to the exploitation.

With anticipated exponential growth of connected devices, future networks require an open solutions architecture facilitated by standards and a strong ecosystem. Such devices need an easy interface to the connected network to request the kind of communication service characterized by guarantees about bandwidth, delay, jitter, packet loss or redundancy. In response, the network should grant the requested network resources automatically and program the intermediate networking devices based on device profile and privileges. Similar requirement also comes from business applications where application itself asks for particular network resources based on its needs. Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) provide promising combination leading to programmable connectivity, rapid service provisioning and service chaining. As a part of 5G PPP programme, VirtuWind will develop and demonstrate SDN & NFV ecosystem, based on open, modular and secure framework showcasing a prototype for intra-domain and inter-domain scenarios in real wind parks as a representative use case of industrial networks, and validate the economic viability of the demonstrated solution. The wind park control network has been chosen as a professional application in VirtuWind as wind energy has now established itself as a mainstream of sustainable energy generation. By envisioning lower capital expenditure and operational expenditure costs in control network infrastructure, VirtuWind will play important role in assisting wind energy sector to achieve cost reductions. Further applicability of VirtuWind solution in other industrial domains will bring multifold benefits in their communication networks. The VirtuWind consortium consists of strong industry and academic partners covering the whole value chain of programmable networks. The consortium is striving for a common vision of creating industrial capability of SDN/NFV in Europe.