DISPLAY - Distributed hybrIdSimulation PLAtform for ATM and VTS sYstems

The distributed nature and huge complexity of modern systems which are required to provide integrated services and functiona lities, move industry to achieve interoperability among heterogeneous subsystems, even spread among different countries, envisaged as the best way to allow them interoperating and to dominate overall systems’ complexity. Such an ambitious goal, which is currently addressed by several academic and industrial European wide research initiatives, makes definitely more complicated for designers and developers the task of facing and solving integration and configuration issues of both pre-existing and under development systems. Indeed, integration among components may introduce unexpected system behaviors that usually manifest late, i.e., during systems installation and execution time, thus impacting on systems dependability and performance. Additionally, as they cannot be detected earlier, they require on-site maintenance operations resulting in increased maintenance costs and overspending in terms of personnel resources. For this reason, industries need novel methodologies and tools to face the paradigm migration from centralized and monolithic systems to open, distributed an interconnected Systems of Systems (SoS) safely, i.e., to dominate systems complexity and to prevent costs exponential increase. If the former exhibited predictable behavior and were easier to control, since they were almost always developed in- house, the latter open new scenarios in which the companies have to deal with both third party (COTS, Commercial Off-The Shelf)and in-house (named target hereafter) developed components. A promising way to cope with these new systems, and to lower maintenance costs, is to reproduce such complex and distributed systems locally, and let them run prior to the actual execution on-site in order to get knowledge about their real behavior and define mitigation means and improvement actions. This would also represent a boost to industry competitiveness on the reference market in that it would allow to deliver higher quality solutions, in terms of both dependability and performance. Academic and industrial research are striving significant effort in this direction, especially in the field of mission and safety critical systems which are required to exhibit predictable dependability behaviour, and for which higher complexity means complicated fault activation patterns and higher failure probabilities. Hybrid and distributed simulation strategies, supported by novel technologies for resources virtualization and working environment reproduction, represent the most promising way to define the needed strategies to actually support such paradigm shift. The aim of this project is twofold. First, it aims to follow such research trend to improve skills and renew industrial processes by investigating the existing technologies for hybrid and distributed simulation, as well as data distribution strategies on wide scale and the most advanced techniques for systems emulation. Second, it aims to realize a distributed and hybrid simulation platform, compliant with the reference standards, which is intended to provide effective support to the daily industry work in all the phases of systems lifecycle. The platform will allow reproducing on local testbeds, by combining simulation and emulation techniques, hardware and software working environments in which real systems are intended to run. On the one hand, this will enable systems designers to evaluate potential actions to undertake both for refining existing systems or designing new ones, considering system requirements evolution and operational environment changes. On the other, it will allow trying out maintenance operations needed to mitigate occurred system failures and/or to prevent estimated potential faults and security threats. This will result in two main benefits i) a significant reduction of costs in all the system life phases and ii), an increased system dependability and security level to get the ultimate in of software product quality. Also, the actual development of this platform would bring a deep innovation into industrial design and development processes, especially with respect to very large and critical systems, thus consolidating company placement on reference market sectors and boosting its penetration into new ones. In the context of this project a system is meant as made up of a real target in charge of interoperating with COTS components through emulated network and hardware resources. The former will be simulated according to distributedsimulation pillars, whereas the latter will be emulated to reproduce their real behavior. Virtualization strategies and technique will be used, if possible, to optimize computational and communication resources in charge of connecting different parts of the system. The platform, then, will act as a glue layer among simulated components and targets, providing configuration and emulation facilities as well as virtualization capabilities to be exploited in order to reproduce the overall, distributed system, on a local testbed. Using such a platform will allow i) to perform early analysis of design and development decisions on real targets, ii) to change and adapt taken decisions according to system workload changes, iii) to plan and verify the effectiveness of maintenance operation for foreseen or already known faults, both spontaneous and malicious, thus optimizing maintenance time and costs. This will be achieved not only on the real target but also at the overall system scope thus allowing also to undertake dependability analysis and define improving solutions in terms of dependability and performances. The platform will be validated on real world industrial case studies provided by SELEX in the field of VTS, as well as training systems for both military and civil applications. Leveraging the skills and know how gained from the COSMIC project experience, it will be developed open source, against high performance and low overhead requirements, and will aim to overcome the limitations of existing, general purpose, solutions which stand in the way of their introduction into daily industrial processes. Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, do not exist any hybrid simulation platforms able to completely fulfill SELEX needs. The innovation introduced by the project is expected to impact on all the industry market divisions, from strategic planning and marketing, through system design and development and up to risk management sector. Then, the increased quality of delivered solutions, which will be sided by such innovative support methodologies and tools, will open new business opportunities and will enable SELEX to face next future market needs successfully. Additionally, projects results and outcomes will boost industries competitiveness on the target region (i.e., regione di convergenza).