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Section: Overall Objectives

Objectives of the team

The DistribCom team is jointly headed by Albert Benveniste (official head for Inria) and Claude Jard. It addresses models and algorithms for distributed network and service management, and the distributed management of Web services and business processes.

Today, research on network and service management as well as Web Services mainly focuses on issues of software architecture and infrastructure deployment. However, these areas also involve algorithmic problems such as fault diagnosis and alarm correlation, testing, QoS evaluation, negotiation, and monitoring. The DistribCom team develops the foundations supporting such algorithms. Our algorithms are model-based. Our research topics are therefore structured as follows:

  1. Fundamentals of distributed observation and supervision of concurrent systems: this provides the foundations for deriving models and algorithms for the above mentioned tasks.

  2. Self-modeling: for obvious reasons of complexity, our models cannot be built by hand. We thus address the new topic of self-modeling, i.e., the automatic construction of models, both structural and behavioral.

  3. Algorithms for distributed management of telecommunications systems and services.

  4. Web Services orchestrations, functional and QoS aspects.

  5. Active XML peers for Web scale data and workflow management.

Our main industrial ties are with Alcatel-Lucent, and France-Telecom, on the topic of networks and service management.

This year, Inria, Centre of Rennes-Bretagne-Atlantique, decided that Axel Legay and his group of post-docs and PhDs would get hosted by DistribCom. It was decided that, for a first period (until august 2011), this hosting would have no effect on the topics of both Axel's group and DistribCom in its previous geometry. In august 2011, we decided to make the merge more effective, by having Axel's group joining the group seminars with full participation. It is expected that some move in the activities of both bodies may result. The activities of Axel's group are specifically reported in Sections 3.4 , 6.5 , and 6.6 .

Guillaume Aucher joined the team in May 2011.

Also, François Schwarzentruber joined the team in September 2011, so his work is not reported here.