Integrated development and operations management framework for cyber-physical systems of systems under the paradigm of swarm intelligence

Project Information

1-SWARM

Grant agreement ID: 871743

DOI

10.3030/871743

Project closed

EC signature date 5 December 2019

Start date 1 January 2020

End date 30 June 2023

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 4 997 522,50

EU contribution

€ 4 997 522,50

Coordinated by

SPINDOX LABS SRL
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - 1-SWARM (Integrated development and operations management framework for cyber-physical systems of systems under the paradigm of swarm intelligence)

Reporting period: 2021-07-01 to 2023-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Recent years have seen the widespread diffusion of low-cost computational systems, triggering the transition towards even further decentralization towards the Edge of autonomic intelligence. In the consumer domain, where requirements for reliability are much lower and life-cycles shorter, this transformation is happening very fast. On the contrary, industrial applications are inevitably more conservative and require solid methodological and technological grounds to guarantee this transition to be dependable. Moreover, the physicality of these “Systems of Cyber Physical Systems” is evidently much more critical for industry, leading to even further constraints on security and safety across all major stages of their full life-cycle.

1-SWARM project focuses on the design-operations for CPSoS with the specific focus on cross-domain use-cases in the industrial sector of large-scale distribution and logistics. The project aims at achieving industrially acceptable level of robustness of heterogeneous networks of CPS whose operation emerges as “Swarm Intelligence”. The solution aimed by 1-SWARM will span across different steps of the value chain, connecting intelligence through the digital domain to maximize their effectiveness and reliability. The objective is to provide a methodological and technological framework, modular and re-usable (“Swarm Intelligence DevOps Framework”), for the engineering of the three major aspects of CPSoS: i) The HW/SW runtime platform that sustains their operations; ii) The distributed and orchestrated Intelligence that guarantees their autonomic behavior; iii) The extension of their “existence” into the cyber-domain for a full life-cycle approach.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

1-SWARM consortium achieved several intermediate results for the definition of the 1-SWARM framework and in line with the eight objectives listed in the proposal. Briefly, the main achievements are grouped as following:

1) How to ease both the ease the engineering, deployment and maintenance of IEC61499-based CPSoS
2) How to verify and validate the design and development of IEC61499-based CPS
3) How to ease human-CPSoS interaction in real-life environment
4) How to reduce cyber-security concerns of IEC61499-based CPS
5) How to extract information from the data stream produced by IEC61499-based CPS
6) How to integrate IEC61499-based CPS with their digital counterpart (digital twins) to enable a life-cycle management
7) How to collect both numerical and mathematical evidences of the soundness and correctness of 1-SWARM framework.

For a complete overview, we invite the reader to review the Technical Report.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

1-SWARM tackles the issues of CPSoS considering the specificities on an industrial sector (large-scale distribution and logistics networks) where the entanglement of CPS functionalities happens at several levels, potentially across different steps of the corresponding value chain. This means that the behaviour of a “swarm” of intelligent CPS acting, for instance, in a distribution hub may impact on the activities of a linked network of other CPS implementing the distribution of goods to retailers. The total robustness of the overarching system must arise both as emerging property due to the autonomic skills of single groups of CPS but also thanks to higher layers of orchestrating intelligence, including humans within the decision making work-flows. The approach proposed by 1-SWARM is therefore based on a modular and scalable framework, standardizing the way intelligent agents are represented and orchestrated, from design to runtime stage, in several interconnected teams with multiple dynamically-varying objectives.

1-SWARM will develop a methodological and technological framework (= “Swarm Intelligence DevOps Framework”, modular and re-usable in its approach, to ease the design, deployment and maintenance of CPSoS spanning across different steps of the value chain. This framework will cover the three major engineering challenges of: i) Providing a HW/SW operations and runtime platform for CPSoS; ii) Facilitating the deployment of “Swarm Intelligence” into the systems; iii) Anchoring their life-cycle management onto a digital-twin infrastructure.

In 1-SWARM a systemic approach has been chosen to improve the quality and cost of development and operations for large CPSoS (the “Swarm Intelligence DevOps Framework”), tackling the corresponding engineering challenges from a multi-dimensional point of view. To quantify the impact that the project’s technologies and methodologies can have, the different life-cycle stages of a CPSoS have been considered, identifying the most relevant ones: i) Conception and design; ii) Deployment, operation and (re-)configuration. Since each of them is characterized by its own peculiarities, different evaluation metrics have been identified to demonstrate the effectiveness of 1-SWARM’s solution.

Reference technical framework of the project