Mixed-Criticality Cyber-Physical Systems (MCCPS) deployed in critical domains like automotive and railway are starting to use Over The Air Software Updates (OTASU) for functionality improvement, bug fixing, and solving security vulnerabilities (among others). But, OTASU entails several difficulties: 1) Safety including non-functional properties like real-time, functional safety, and energy-efficiency. 2) Security. OTASU creates entry points for hackers 3) Availability. During updates the system is not available. While this is just inconvenient for mainstream devices, this is not acceptable for critical MCCPS that must remain active during operation. Additionally, computing performance needs are bigger and therefore complex hardware platforms based on multicore processors and accelerators are used in MCCPS. Such complex hardware platforms, software applications are subject to intricate dependences in their functional and non-functional behaviour. For facing these two trends in MCCPS: OTASU and complex hardware platforms, that entails relevant research challenges, the UP2DATE project propose: a new software paradigm for SAfety and SEcurity (SASE) software updates for intelligent and resource intensive MCCPS, promoting a safety and security concept that builds around composability and modularity as main properties to enable a dynamic (post-deployment) validation of SASE properties. A high quality and complementary consortium comprising knowledge generators (IKL, BSC and OFFIS) plus technology integrators (IAV and TTA) and two end uses from the automotive and railway sector (MM and CAF), will be able to test in two uses cases a new software architecture that will enable the runtime deployment of new (mixed-criticality) applications remotely (patching existing functions or extending the functionality) in heterogeneous computing platforms. The total budget foreseen for this research project is around €3.8M.

Critical Real-Time Embedded Systems (CRTES) such as railway, aerospace, automotive and energy generation systems face a disruptive challenge caused by the massive irruption of mixed-criticality systems based on multicore processors. At the same time low-power is an intensifying demand in many market segments, a competitive advantage for CRTES that have to operate with limited energy (e.g., battery powered systems), an enabler for higher availability and a desired feature towards near-zero emission in systems with tens/hundreds of devices. Power is also a key aspect in mixed-criticality systems as another resource (together with time and space) that has to be shared among different applications and has to be strictly controlled not to cause undesired interferences. The main objective of SAFEPOWER is to enable the development of mixed-criticality systems with low power, energy and temperature in combination with safety, real-time and security support by a reference architecture orchestrating different local power-management techniques. SAFEPOWER builds a comprehensive suite of multi-core platform technologies as well as analysis, simulation and verification tools for low-power mixed-criticality systems, including hardware and software reference platforms assisting the implementation, observation and test of such applications. SAFEPOWER will demonstrate the benefits through two industrial use-cases and a cross-domain public demonstrator. The safety concept of SAFEPOWER will be assessed by an external certification authority and consider reference domains and safety standards (e.g. industrial IEC-61508, railway, automotive, aerospace). SAFEPOWE brings significant improvements w.r.t. power, energy, temperature, availability and lifetime of CRTES as well as new types of competitive products operating with limited energy. Impact and exploitation will also be facilitated by the strong collaboration with other related projects in the cluster of mixed-criticality systems.

Existing HW/SW platforms for safety-critical systems suffer from limited performance and/or from lack flexibility due to building on specific proprietary components, which jeopardize their wide deployment across domains. While some research attempts have been done to overcome some of these limitations, their degree of success has been low due to missing flexibility and extensibility, which would ensure that industry can take that path, as many industries need technologies on which they can rely during decades (e.g. avionics, space, automotive). A number of high-performance computing (HPC) commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms offer the computation capabilities needed by autonomous systems in domains such as automotive, space, avionics, robotics and factory automation by means of multicores, GPUs and other accelerators. Unfortunately, the utilization of HPC platforms has been traditionally considered out of the reach of the safety critical systems industry due to the difficulties or roadblocks these platforms bring to the certification process. SELENE follows a radically new approach and proposes a Safety-critical Cognitive Computing Platform (CCP) with self-awareness, self-adapting, and autonomous capabilities. SELENE’s CCP uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to adapt the system to the particular internal and external (environmental) conditions with the aim of maximizing the efficiency of the system being able at the same time of meeting application requirements. AI techniques are feed with information provided by the on-line monitors and external sensors and are applied in a transparent way without compromising the safety of the system. To ensure safety requirements are preserved SELENE’s CCP relies on the strong isolation capabilities provided at hardware and software levels.

The railway sector is currently acting in a fragmented way and in silos, corresponding most often to physical or functional subsystems or use cases, and the different owners/managers of the overall infrastructure at regional/national level, without global extensive view or full control of the global system involved by rail operations. With the progress of digitization, analogue devices based on relays were progressively substituted by digital ones, and it is more and more evident that enabling the communication between already existing digital tools for various subsystems can be beneficial. What is missing is an efficient, automated and standardized way for these integrated and interplaying systems to act as one ecosystem: sharing, integrating, identifying, correlating and exploiting the right data at the right time. In order to meet these challenges, the objective of LinX4Rail is to develop and promote within Shift2Rail framework and beyond, a sectorial common Functional Railway System Architecture. It will be supported by a widely adopted Shift2Rail Conceptual Data Model (CDM) that will, with the commitment of the Shift2Rail members, through Shift2Rail Programme Board Change Management Process, establish the standard for interactions between legacy and new systems and thus ensure sustainable interoperability between systems. The ambition of LinX4Rail is to achieve a comprehensive approach for the CDM, global system modelling specification and a strategy for implementation of technological breakthroughs, including RCA, with the inputs from a communication system perspective and give a vision of future evolution of Functional Railway System Architecture.

European Railway operators are under pressure to decrease their life cycle cost, to increase significantly their reliability and punctuality, to be more adaptive to different services. The European railway system remaining very fragmented in terms of technologies, the adoption of new technologies and the renewal of former technologies are not quicker enough for the railway mode to answer rightly to the public policy needs. Research and innovation has a part to play in achieving these goals by giving to the datas and their models and further the definition of a global railway system architecture as it is developing in other transport modes and industries the relevant roles that will support the necessary evolutions. The undergoing LinX4Rail project sets the grounds for a shared vision of the railway system architecture, as well as the development of the Conceptual Data Model (CDM) which will enable different simulation or operational subsystems to run together, which paves the way to building a shared and interoperable architecture. The objectives of LINX4RAIL-2 are: • To manage the follow-up of the existing work on System Architecture and Conceptual Data Model (CDM) carried out in the on-going LinX4Rail project, aiming at a large adoption for the European railways sector, • To ensure wider uptake of results from LinX4Rail by proving the performance of the proposal methodology and vision and by evaluating the impacts, taking into account the business case, • To establish a single ‘repository’ for System Architecture and CDM with a well-developed sustainability plan, • To adopt a common vision for the functional railway vision able to transform the Europe railway system.