Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

CIRIC

In the context of CIRIC, we cooperate with the team of Reinaldo Vallejos, professor at the UTFSM, Valparaíso, Chile, on different topics related to networking and modeling issues. Specifically, these activities have been organized around two collaborative projects, 9.3.2 and 9.3.4.1 below, where one can find the scientific details. We start to work also with Javiera Barrera's team at the University Adolfo Ibañez, Santiago de Chile, on stochastic optimization problems.

CIRIC stopped its activities in some whole areas such as telecommunications, but our cooperative work continues without interruption.

Inria Chile

Associate Team involved in the International Lab:

MANAP

• Title: MANAP (Markovian ANalysis and APplications)

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria (Chile) - Telematics - Vallejos Reinaldo

• Start year: 2013

• See also: http://people.rennes.inria.fr/Gerardo.Rubino/RESEARCH/MANAP/manap.html

• This project had two goals. The main one was to develop techniques allowing to accelerate solving techniques for Markov models, both in equilibrium and in their transient phases. The applications behind these efforts are the evaluation of performance, dependability and performability properties of complex communication systems. The second goal was to apply these solving techniques to specific problems in networking, concerning optical and wireless infrastructures. On both cases there was some emphasis on dependability aspects: fault tolerance routing schemes in the first case, complex dependability characteristics and their analysis in the second one. A third explicit objective was to start the design of a software tool implementing the techniques coming from the main research direction of the project, designed to be used both by engineers and researchers.

  We achieved some of these objectives, which made us decide to interrupt the associate team and to study the idea of proposing a new one at the end of 2016 or 2017 (see  9.3.4.1 ). A supplementary reason to do so is to rebuild some structure like MANAP but in a three-country scheme, including a group in Uruguay with which we worked during all MANAP's life.

Inria International Partners

MOCQUASIN

• Title: Monte Carlo and Quasi- Monte Carlo for rare event simulation

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • University of Montreal (Canada)

• Duration: 2013 - $\cdots$

• See also: http://www.irisa.fr/dionysos/pages_perso/tuffin/MOCQUASIN/

• The goal of this team is to compute integrals, sums or to solve equations or optimization problems by means of Monte Carlo methods, which are statistical tools used when the models have a high complexity (for instance a large dimension). They are unavoidable tools in areas such as finance, electronics, seismology, computer science, engineering, physics, transport, biology, social sciences... Nonetheless, they have the reputation of being slow, i.e. to require a large computational time to reach a given precision. The goal of the project is to work on acceleration techniques, meaning methods allowing to reach the targeted precision in a shorter computational time. A typical framework is that of rare event simulation for which getting even only one occurrence of the event could require a very long time. In this case, there are two main acceleration techniques: importance sampling and splitting, on which we work.

Informal International Partners

We restarted the cooperation of G. Rubino with the Cal Poly at Pomona, California, specifically with professor Alan Krinik, Head of the Mathematics Department. The topic is the transient analysis of stochastic processes. See [69] and [68] , and the description made in  7.2 , page  7.2 .

Participation in other International Programs

Stic AmSud with UDELAR, Uruguay, and UTFSM, Chile

• Program: Stic AmSud

• Title: Dependability Analysis Tool (DAT)

• Inria principal investigator: Gerardo Rubino

• International Partners (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • University of the Republic (UDELAR), Montevideo, Uruguay – Computer Science at the Engineering Faculty – prof. Héctor Cancela

  • Technical University Federico Santa María (UTFSM), Valparaíso, Chile – Electronics Department – Prof. Reinaldo Vallejos

• Duration: 2 years, Jan. 2015 – Dec. 2016

• The main scientific objective of this project is to develop new techniques to assess the most important dependability properties of a complex system subject to the failures and possible repairs of its components. The central argument behind our proposal is our previous work in the area and some unpublished preliminary and promising results that we believe deserve deep exploration and that should lead to faster evaluation procedures than those available today. This constitute the main achievements of the associated team MANAP (see  9.3.2 ). We also intend to implement these techniques in an integrated software package usable both in industry and for teaching purposes. Concerning applications, again based on the skills of the participating teams and our past common work, we will illustrate our findings on problems coming from the wireless and optical networking domains.