Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR FAUTOCOES

The goal of the project ”FAUTOCOES” (number ANR-09-SEGI-004) of the ARPEGE program of the French National Agency of Research (ANR) can be described as follows. Today, complex technological processes must maintain an acceptable behavior in the event of random structural perturbations, such as failures or component degradation. Aerospace engineering provides numerous examples of such situations: an aircraft has to pursue its mission even if some gyroscopes are out of order, a space shuttle has to succeed in its re-entry trip with a failed on-board computer. Failed or degraded operating modes are parts of an embedded system history and should therefore be accounted for during the control synthesis.

These few basic examples show that complex systems like embedded systems are inherently vulnerable to failure of components and their reliability has to be improved through fault-tolerant control. Embedded systems require mathematical representations which are in essence dynamic, multi-model and stochastic. This increasing complexity poses a genuine scientific challenge:

• to model explicitly and realistically the dynamical interactions existing between the physical state variables defining the system: pressure, temperature, flow rate, intensity, etc, and the functional and dysfunctional behavior of its components;

• to estimate the performance of the system through the evaluation of reliability indexes such as availability, quality, and safety;

• to optimize the control to prevent system failures, as well as to maintain the system function when a failure has occurred.

Our aim is to meet the previously mentioned challenge by using the framework of piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMP's in short) with an emphasis on probabilistic and deterministic numerical methods. More precisely, our objectives are

• to use the framework of piecewise deterministic Markov processes to model complex physical systems and phenomena;

• to compute expectations of functionals of the process in order to evaluate the performance of the system;

• to develop theoretical and numerical control tools for PDMP's to optimize the performance and/or to maintain system function when a failure has occurred.

More details are available at http://fautocoes.bordeaux.inria.fr/ .

ANR ADAPTEAU

The ANR project ADAPTEAU has been obtained for the period 2012-2016 and will start in january 2012.

ADAPTEAU aims to contribute to the analysis and management of global change impacts and adaptation patterns in River-Estuarine Environments (REEs) by interpreting the scientific challenges associated with climate change in terms of: i) scale mismatches; ii) uncertainty and cognitive biases between social actors; iii) interdisciplinary dialogue on the "adaptation" concept; iv) critical insights on adaptive governance and actions, v) understanding the diversity of professional, social and economic practices vis-à-vis global change. The project aims to build an integrative and interdisciplinary framework involving biophysical and social sciences, as well as stakeholders and civil society partners. The main objective is to identify adaptive strategies able to face the stakes of global change in REEs, on the basis of what we call ‘innovative adaptation options’.

We consider the adaptation of Social-Ecological Systems (SES) through the expected variations of the hydrological regimes (floods / low-flow) of the Garonne-Gironde REE—a salient issue in SW France, yet with a high potential for genericity The ADAPTEAU project will be organised as follows:

• Achieve and confront socio-economic and environmental assessments of expected CC impacts on the Garonne-Gironde river-estuarine continuum (task 1);

• Identify the emerging ‘innovative adaptation options’ endorsed by various social, economic, political actors of the territory (depolderisation, ‘room for rivers’ strategies, changes in economic activities, agricultural systems or social practices), then test their environmental, economic and social robustness through a selected subset (task 2);

• Scientists, representatives from administrators and civil society collaborate to build adaptation scenarios, and discuss them in pluralistic arenas in order to evaluate their social and economic feasibility, as well as the most appropriate governance modes (task 3).

• Disseminate the adaptation strategies to academics and managers, as well as to the broader society (task 4).

  The expected results are the definition and diffusion of new regional-scale reference frameworks for the discussion of adaptation scenarios in REE and other SESs, as well as action guidelines to better address climate change stakes.

The CQFD team work on tasks 1 and 3.

ANR Piece

ANR Piece (2013-2016) of the program Jeunes chercheuses et jeunes chercheurs of the French National Agency of Research (ANR), lead by F. Malrieu (Univ. Tours). The Piecewise Deterministic Markov Processes (PDMP) are non-diffusive stochastic processes which naturally appear in many areas of applications as communication networks, neuron activities, biological populations or reliability of complex systems. Their mathematical study has been intensively carried out in the past two decades but many challenging problems remain completely open. This project aims at federating a group of experts with different backgrounds (probability, statistics, analysis, partial derivative equations, modeling) in order to pool everyone's knowledge and create new tools to study PDMPs. The main lines of the project relate to estimation, simulation and asymptotic behaviors (long time, large populations, multi-scale problems) in the various contexts of application.