Cloud Computing is a paradigm for enabling remote, on-demand access to a set of configurable computing resources. This model aims to provide hardware and software services to customers, while minimizing human efforts in terms of service installation, configuration and maintenance, for both cloud provider and cloud customer. A cloud may have the form of an Infrastructure as a Service (SaaS), a Platform as a Service (PaaS) or a Software as a Service (SaaS). However, cloud’s ad-hoc management in terms of quality-of-service and service level agreement (SLA) poses significant challenges to the performance, availability, energy consumption and economical costs of the cloud. We believe that a differentiating element between Cloud Computing environments will be the quality-of-service and the service level agreement (SLA) provided by the cloud. The objective of the MyCloud project is to define and implement a novel cloud model: SLAaaS (SLA aware Service). The SLAaaS model enriches the general paradigm of Cloud Computing, and enables systematic and transparent integration of service levels and SLA to the cloud. SLAaaS is orthogonal to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS clouds and may apply to any of them. The MyCloud project takes into account both the cloud provider and cloud customer points of view. From cloud provider’s point of view, MyCloud proposes autonomic SLA management to handle performance, availability, energy and cost issues in the cloud. An innovative approach combines control theory techniques with distributed algorithms and language support in order to build autonomic elastic clouds. Novel models, control laws, distributed algorithms and languages will be proposed for automated provisioning, configuration and deployment of cloud services to meet SLA requirements, while tackling scalability and dynamics issues. On the other hand from cloud customer’s point of view, the MyCloud project provides SLA governance. It allows cloud customers to be part of the loop and to ba automatically notified about the state of the cloud, such as SLA violation and cloud energy consumption. The former provides more transparecy about SLA guaranties, and the latter aims to raise customers’ awareness about cloud’s energy footprint. Two use cases are considered in the MyCloud project, both are proposed by industrial partners of the project and reflect real usage of the cloud. The first use case is related to a SaaS cloud that is autonomously elastic in order to meet performance requirements and scale with cloud usage. The second use case aims to reduce energy usage in the cloud and to notify cloud customers about cloud’s energy footprint. The MyCloud project is a well-balanced consortium with 3 academic partners (INRIA, LIP6, EMN) and 2 industrial partners (We Are Cloud, Elastic Grid).

Pervasive computing is now a reality with the massive deployment of mobile appliances, particularly smart phones. Despite the increasing importance of pervasive applications, providing adequate support for them within a computing environment remains a challenge. Pervasive applications vary greatly in their resource requirements (processors, memory bandwidth, and disks): for critical applications, such as surveillance systems, a known bounded amount of resources must be guaranteed for the application to run properly; for multimedia applications, the amount of resources needed may change over time and dynamic adaption is often required. To manage these differing and possibly varying resource requirements, a system of resource reservations is required. Because the availability of resources is global to a computing environment, such reservations have to be managed at the middleware level. Modern pervasive middleware is typically implemented using Java, for example with OSGi or Android, because of its safety, flexibility, and mature development environment. However, the Java virtual machine specification has not been revised since 1999, at the time when the idea of pervasive computing was first introduced. It was designed to execute only a single application at a time, and thus it does not provide resource accounting or per-application resource reservations. Current pervasive middlewares are thus unable to reserve resources for critical applications, which may cause these applications to crash or hang when insufficient resources are available, and are unable to provide resource accounting, making it impossible to balance the load on the devices and to optimize resource use. The Infra-JVM project will investigate how to enhance the design of Java virtual machines with new functionalities to better manage resources. As a result of the project, we will propose a new Java virtual machine prototype based on our prototype of Java virtual machine VMKit that will integrate functionalities for resource accounting and reservation, for application-driven scheduling, and for effective memory management. We will evaluate this prototype on a pervasive end-to-end experimental use-case provided by one of the partners. This use-case is an information system that allows real time communication and coordination between firefighters and various command positions.

The COROUSSO project deals with the modelling and control of robots for machining operations of large composite parts and friction stir welding (FSW). As a matter of fact, those machining and welding operations are usually realized by means of expensive custom-made machines. As a consequence, manufacturers (mainly aeronautical manufacturers) require new devices to allow them to decrease the manufacturing cost as well as to improve the machining quality. It appears that the robotization of the manufacturing processes is a relevant solution. However, industrial robots are usually not stiff enough for machining operations and FSW and the quality of the resulting machined or welded parts does not respect the specifications. Accordingly, the project aims to propose three strategies to improve robot machining quality. First, the flexibilities of the robots will be taken into account in their control loop. Then, the uncertainties will be also considered in the control loop of the robots in order to obtain a robust control. Finally, the influence of the path (part to be welded or machined) placement on the machining quality will be studied. This project will also focus on the elastodynamic performance of the robots. Indeed, the wrench exerted on the end-effector of the robot due to manufacturing or the welding process can generate some distortions of the robot architecture as well as some vibrations. In order to decrease those distortions and vibrations, the elastodynamic model of the robot will be implemented in its control loop. The parameters of the elastodynamic model will be also identified experimentally beforehand. Moreover, the distortions and vibrations of the robot should be also reduced by means of force feedback control and a force sensor that will be installed between the robot end-effector and the tool. It is apparent that the better the modelling of the robot and its environment, namely the production process, the better the performance of the robot. Therefore, the kinematic and dynamic modelling of the FSW process and the manufacturing process used to machine large composite parts will be determined in the scope of this project. The partners of the project already have good knowledge of those processes but some research work has to be done in order to implement the obtained models in the control loop of the robot. This will be a major contribution of COROUSSO project. The knowledge of COROUSSO partners fit well with the project. The IRCCyN (Nantes) is well known in the field of robotics and manufacturing and mainly for its research works on robot design, modelling and control. The LCFC (Metz) has contributed a lot the last few decades in the fields of modelling and optimization of production processes like FSW. Besides, LCFC researchers took part in some industrial projects on robot control. The two industrial partners, i.e., ``l’Institut de Soudure’’ and ``Europe Technologies’’ are well known for your research works on production process and development of new manufacturing techniques. Finally, the COROUSSO project aims to provide theoretical and experimental results on the development of robotic cells dedicated to machining of large composite parts FSW. The technology transfer in the production domain will be realized by means of experimental tests conducted by the industrial partners to highlight critical operations. The contributions of the project should also help us robotize other production process later.