Section: New Results

Putting DiaSuite to Work

A continuing concern of the Phoenix research group is to put our work into practice by tackling realistic applications. We have validated DiaSuite on a variety of applications in areas including telecommunications, pervasive computing, and avionics.

Our expertise in smart home and building, combined with the maturity of DiaSuite, have given rise to the development of a dedicated instance of our technology called DiaSuiteBox. This instance is destined for technology transfer.

Applying DiaSuite to a Variety of Areas.

Let us examine the application of DiaSuite to two key areas: pervasive computing and avionics. In each case, demonstrations and posters have been presented to researchers and industrial partners  [24] , [25] , [23] , [35]

Smart Homes.

Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This challenge involves coping with heterogeneous entities, overcoming the intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test the application, and finally deploying it.

At the beginning of this evaluation period, our research group was mainly interested in orchestrating applications in the telecommunications domain, leveraging new opportunities created by the emergence of Voice over IP (mainly based on SIP). Concurrently, a myriad of objects became networked, prompting a need to expand the scope of telecommunications beyond human-human interaction.

Two main industrial collaborations were instrumental to explore the scope of this evolution and to validate the Diasuite approach with realistic case studies. First, we collaborated with a French telecommunications company, in a two-year project named HomeSIP, to study the convergence between VoIP and networked objects in the context of home automation. During this project, we developed a range of applications, including remote appliance control through phone keypad, TV recording via SMS, and dynamic entry phone systems. Second, we contributed to a two-year project named SmartImmo, which gathered major French companies in the area of building construction, installation, and management. The goal of this project was to create a service infrastructure for building automation. SmartImmo gave us the opportunity to elaborate realistic building automation scenarios (e.g., parking lot management, meeting room reservation, energy monitoring).

Our work on applying DiaSuite to the pervasive computing domain has leveraged key contributions by two PhD students of Phoenix, namely, Wilfried Jouve  [36] and Nicolas Palix  [42] . They both defended at the beginning of this evaluation period.

Avionics.

Safety-critical applications have to fulfill stringent requirements, both functional and non-functional. These requirements have to be coherent with each other and must be preserved throughout the software development process. In this context, a design-driven development approach can play a critical role. However existing design-driven development approaches are often general purpose, providing little, if any, conceptual framework to guide the development. Previously, we explained how the DiaSuite approach was enriched with non-functional declarations such as QoS and error handing.

To validate the interest of DiaSuite for safety-critical applications, several avionics case studies have been realized in the context of a collaboration with Thales, a French airborne systems company. One case study was a flight guidance application; it is in charge of the plane navigation and is under the supervision of the pilot. For example, if the pilot specifies a heading to follow, the application compares it to the current heading, sensed by devices such as the Inertial Reference Unit, and maneuvers ailerons accordingly. To test this application, we have used the DiaSim tool coupled with the FlightGear simulator. A flight guidance application has also been developed for a commercial drone platform. The goal of this application was to make the drone autonomous by following a flight plan similar to the one in avionics.

This simulation work has been presented in the thesis of Julien Bruneau [11] . Non-functional concerns addressing error handling and QoS will be presented in two forthcoming dissertations.

DiaSuiteBox: an Ongoing Technology-Transfer Project.

The DiaSuiteBox platform runs an open-ended set of applications, leveraging a range of appliances and web services. Our solution consists of a dedicated development environment, an application store, and a lightweight runtime platform. This solution is based on DiaSuite.

DiaSuiteBox consists of three main components:

• A tool-based environment is dedicated to the development of applications, orchestrating networked entities. This environment leverages DiaSpec, its compiler and an Eclipse plugin.

• An application store is composed of two servers: (1) a server verifies and packages submitted applications of developers prior to making them available to users and (2) another server enables users to browse, select and install applications.

• An execution environment runs end-user applications and allows to manage and configure all aspects of a smart space. This environment can either be deployed on low-resource computing platform (e.g., Plug-PC, set-top-box) at the end-user's home or in the Cloud, coupled with a gateway for controlling equipments on the end-user's side.

Thanks to the application store and a developer community, the platform should provide users with a stream of innovative applications. During the submission process, an application is automatically analyzed and checked in order to be certified. (This certification process is preliminary in the current version of DiaSuiteBox.) The user is ensured that the behavior of its applications is innocuous and conform to their description. DiaSuiteBox supports several technology standards like UPnP, Bluetooth, USB...This platform can be easily extended by plugging appliances directly on the hardware platform or by connecting devices on the local network.