Universities, R&D Groups and Academic Networks

MODELSWARD is a unique forum for universities, research groups and research projects to present their research and scientific results, be it by presenting a paper, hosting a tutorial or instructional course or demonstrating its research products in demo sessions, by contributing towards panels and discussions in the event's field of interest or by presenting their project, be it by setting up an exhibition booth, by being profiled in the event's web presence or printed materials or by suggesting keynote speakers or specific thematic sessions.

Special conditions are also available for Research Projects which wish to hold meetings at INSTICC events.

Current Academic Partners:

Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute

The Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (Madeira-ITI) is a not-for-profit innovation of the University of Madeira, founded by the University of Madeira, Madeira Tecnopolo, and Carnegie Mellon University. The institute was created in December 2009 in order to provide a home for the numerous collaborations between these partners, in both research and education.

The work of the institute concentrates primarily on innovation in the areas of computer science, human-computer interaction, and entertainment technology.

Since 2011, M-ITI has been part of the Laboratory of Robotics and Systems in Engineering and Science (LARSyS), an association of six R&D units representing four universities in Portugal: Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Universidade dos Açores and Universidade da Madeira.

MegaM@Rt

MegaM@Rt will create a framework incorporating methods and tools for continuous development and validation leveraging the advantages in scalable model-based methods to provide benefits in significantly improved productivity, quality and predictability of large and complex industrial systems.

European industry faces stiff competition on the global arena. The electronic systems become more and more complex and call for modern engineering practices to tackle productivity and quality. The model-driven technologies promise significant productivity gains, which have been proven in several studies. However, these technologies need more development to scale for real-life industrial projects and provide advantages in runtime. MegaM@Rt brings the model-driven engineering to the next level in order to help European industry to reduce development and maintenance costs as well as to reinforce productivity and quality.

The specific scientific and technological objectives include development of:

scalable methods and tools for modelling of functional and non-functional properties such as performance, consumption, security and safety with mechanisms for representation of results of runtime analysis.
scalable methods and tools for application validation at runtime including scalable methods for models@runtime, verification and online testing.
infrastructure for efficient handling and management of numerous, heterogeneous and large models potentially covering several functional and non-functional domains.
holistic traceability 1) capable to link and manage models and their elements from different tools as well as 2) suitable for large distributed cross-functional working teams.
specific demonstrators and validate MegaM@Rt technologies through 10 complementary industrial case studies.

https://megamart2-ecsel.eu/

CPSwarm

The project positions itself in the domain of CPS system design and engineering, and aims at providing tools and methodologies that pave the way towards well-established, model-based and predictive engineering design method-ologies and toolchains for next generation CPS systems. The project builds upon state of the art in CPS and IoT and aims at bridging the gaps between currently available approaches and methodologies, and at providing a relevant subset of the glue toolchains and layers which are currently missing in CPS design . CPSwarm tackles the above challenge by establishing a science of system integration in the domain of swarms of CPS, i.e., of complex herds of heterogeneous CPS systems that interact and collaborate based on local policies and that collectively exhibit a be-havior capable of solving complex, industrial-driven, real-world problems. basic components, functions and prototype behaviors, and enables the designer to: (a) set-up collaborative autono-mous CPSs; (b) test the swarm performance with respect to the design goal (i.e., to evaluate the solution fitness against the design requirements); (c) massively deploy solutions towards “reconfigurable” CPS devices and CPSoS. CPSwarm builds upon well-known initiatives and state-of-the-art solutions for CPS design, such as the Ptolemy project and the Action Webs research , and it considers autonomic and swarm computing as thrusters to address the enormous potential, and risks, represented by billions of networked sensing and actuating devices deployed worldwide. Model-centric design is the spine of the CPSwarm project, which, in fact, aims at providing a library of reusable models for CPS design. Additionally, predictive engineering is another pillar of the project, enabling model verification and simulation of collaborative, autonomous, CPS behavior against real-world and hard-to-handle physical data. Such an approach pushes forward CPS engineering at a large scale, with expected significant reduction of development time and total cost of ownership.

MODELS

MODELS, System modeling and design exploration of applications for heterogeneous and parallel platforms

The project will develop an unified environment for the design of system applications on parallel platforms based on CPU, multicore, manycore, FPGA and heterogeneous SoCs. The design tools composing this environment will provide an unified SW/HW specification interface and systematic procedures for composing models at different abstraction levels allowing for the automatic validation, drastically reducing the verification and debugging efforts. The implementation of processing demanding applications can be satisfied by using new multi/many-core processing platforms, but new designs or porting IPs on them is difficult and costly. The integrated design flow of this project intends to provide: portability of IPs, systematic system design explorations, high level synthesis of executables, systematic test-bench generation at different design abstraction levels. All means to achieve cost effectiveness of designs on parallel platforms. The pivotal technical product of this project is a design/development environment consisting of a suite of software tools and associated artifacts (libraries, applications, documentation etc.). It supports a platform-independent programming model geared toward streaming application areas such as signal processing, video compression, digital modulation, industrial visual inspection, 3D medical image processing, data processing, audio processing and many others, and their efficient implementation on a wide range of commercial parallel platforms, from SMP multicores, to manycores, processor arrays, programmable logic devices, and heterogeneous SoCs. The essential features of the approach are: high level platform independent system specification, design space exploration capabilities, automatic synthesis of executables, automated verification and validation of designs at different abstraction levels. Another particular concern in this context is a principled approach to leveraging legacy IP, i.e. the use of existing code and optimized platform-specific modules in the development process. A key role of the industrial project partners is to provide important specific requirements and contexts that will influence the development of the software tools, and then to apply, customize, and re-target them to their respective platforms and applications, adding to the project result. The main project result is the set of SW tools and libraries supporting portable system design on many/multi core heterogeneous platforms building is a step forward beyond sequential programming approaches.