The project kick-off and the first Transfer of Knowledge workshop was held in Florence in the beginning of February 2019. The goal of the workshop was to present the competencies of each partner, and start collecting the new challenges and the requirements of the two industrial case studies. These will serve as a basis for future V&V activities of CPS systems.

The first case study is the Brazilian Environmental Data Collection System (BEDCS) developed and operated at INPE, which is a system to monitor the state of rainforest and oceans. The system consists of more than 800 data collection stations scattered throughout Brazil, satellites collecting the data from the stations, and a data processing and visualization center. The system consists of heterogeneous, dynamic components developed and evolved since the nineties, therefore the V&V of the systems is highly complex and critical. One of the current major challenges is to update the system to a CubeSat-based platform without interruptions in the system operation.

The second use case provided by ResilTech is studying the use of modern, multi-core processors and operating systems in future safety-critical systems. Based on experiences in the automotive, railway and industrial automation domains, currently single-core processors and dedicated operating systems supporting a limited number of devices and sensors are used in safety-critical systems. However, on the one hand due to new CPS application areas, e.g. autonomous driving or intelligent industrial controllers, increased performance and flexibility is needed. On the other hand introducing multi-core processors and more general operating systems pose significant verification and certification challenges. The ADVANCE project will work on V&V techniques applicable in this context and will follow relevant industrial initiatives (e.g. OSADL SIL2LinuxMP).