To celebrate the two visiting "Brazilians", RCL organized a social lunch with some delicious middle-east food thanks to the chef of the group!

This was the perfect time to celebrate the farewell of Leandro Dias da Silva (Universidade Federal do Alagoas - UFAL - Brazil) and Leonardo Montecchi, a former RCL member which now has a position at UNICAMP, the Universidade Estadual do Campinas, in Brazil.

We hope to see you again in Florence, it was a pleasure working with you!

RCL joins the RISE2018 program with the ADVANCE - Addressing Verification and Validation Challenges in Future Cyber-Physical Systems - project, along with the other partners, namely

• RCL: CINI, Italy
• UNIVERSIDADE DE COIMBRA, Portugal
• BUDAPESTI MUSZAKI ES GAZDASAGTUDOMANYI EGYETEM, Hungary
• UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES FUNDACION, Colombia
• RESILTECH SRL, Italy
• UNIVERSIDADE ESTADUAL DE CAMPINAS, Brazil
• INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE PESQUISAS ESPACIAIS, Brazil
  

The abstract of the project (H2020-MSCA-RISE-2018, number 823788) is as follows.

The scientific objective of the ADVANCE project is to conceive new approaches to support the Verification and Validation (V&V) of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). It will explore techniques, methods, and tools applicable to different phases of the system lifecycle, but always with the final objective of improving the effectiveness and efficacy of the V&V process. In particular, ADVANCE will focus on two main aspects of V&V: i) techniques to collect V&V evidences for a CPS (focusing on system modeling, testing, fault forecast, and systematic processes like FMEA), and ii) techniques to manage and analyze data of the system under analysis (focusing on data analysis, requirements management, traceability). The strategic objective of the project is to build an international network of collaborations on the topic of V&V of CPSs. Besides allowing the consortium to reach the project's scientific objectives, the established interactions would allow the training of students and professionals on the latest innovations in the V&V panorama, and have them work together towards a common goal. In fact, besides the technical challenges described above, an important factor hampering advancements in the V&V of CPSs is a worldwide lack of skilled professionals in V&V, software testing, and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in general. One of the outputs of the project will be a set of training material, both in the form of slides and video courses, on the topic of Verification & Validation of Cyber-Physical Systems. These objectives will be pursued by joining together V&V experts having different specialization and different backgrounds, and establishing a targeted transfer of knowledge and collaboration program, using two real case studies as reference

Both former and current RCL people were strongly involved in the organization and as speakers at the Latin-American Dependable Computing (LADC) Conference. More in detail, the conference was co-chaired by Andrea Ceccarelli, while Enrico Schiavone joined the conference as a speaker. It is worth noticing also the contribute of Leonardo Montecchi (Workshop Co-Chair), former member of RCL and now assistant professor at UNICAMP. The conference was a great success; in addition, the attendees were prized with a guided tour of the Iguassu Falls!

EDCC 2018 took place in Iaşi, Romania, between 10-14 September 2018. Located in the North-East of Romania, the city is the main academic, cultural and economic center of the region. EDCC 2018 was organized by the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi (UAIC) with the support of the Horizon 2020 EBSIS project, and, more importantly, had Paolo Lollini as Program Chair!

Today is the first day of the project with RFI - Rete Ferroviaria Italiana - which explores Safe Architectures for SIL4 Railway Systems. This three-year project will see a cooperation between RCL group and the R&D department of RFI, which is managing the railway network in Italy. Main targets of the project will be:

- Definition of architectures for two future SIL4 systems: PMF, which will work onboard of the train, and SEC, which will be deployed inside stations.

- Devising coding rules for implementing SIL4 software in the railway domain, including coding rules, coding styles and quality metrics.

- V&V Plan, and definition of Safety Cases

- Preliminary Hazard Analyses

- Modeling activities for the early validation of the systems above both in terms of Safety and Security.

- Exploring mechanisms for fault-tolerance in the railway domain in accordance with standards such as ERTMS / SCMT (Italian)

- Safe Visualization of safety-critical information on commercial OTS devices (e.g., tablets)

- Implementation of the "Protocollo Vitale Standard" to allow safe communications among subsystems.

Overall, the aim of the project is to devise architectures and mechanisms for SIL4 systems, along with prototypes of specific subsystems.

We also report the Italian name of the project, that is: "Progetto di Ricerca: Specificazione, analisi e valutazione di architetture per applicazioni safety-critical - Architetture Fail-Safe e Fault-Tolerant delle Piattaforme SEC e PMF con Dimostratori della Piattaforma IRM e del Protocollo PVS".

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14th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC-2018)

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Within the last two months, two professors from Universidade Federal de Alagoas (UFAL, in Maceió, Brazil) joined RCL as part of the DEVASSES project. Prof. Leandro Dias da Silva and prof. Tiago Figuereido Vieira shared their work through the following seminars:

• Leandro: 

  Formal methods for system specification 

  (October 23rd)
• Tiago: Assessing Machine Learning Techniques for Vulnerability Prediction (November 23rd)