Marisol García Valls: Addressing dynamic behavior in cyber-physical systems from a communication middleware perspective: Challenges and some selected contributions

Abstract
The current vision of some future systems brings in a degree of complexity that is not manageable with the available design and development methods and technologies. As an example, the scale, heterogeneity, and dynamic behavior of cyber-physical systems pose a number of challenges to the fulfillment of their inherent fundamental properties, such as timeliness. In this context, there are numerous sources of unpredictability such as network transmissions, system reconfiguration needs, etc., that challenge the construction of system models that can be fully designed and verified statically.

Communication middleware is a fundamental software technology with a major role in supporting the dynamic behavior of distributed systems, specially at the large scale. It allows to abstract the application level from the underlying details of the network protocols and the execution platform at the participant nodes or subsystems (i.e., hardware, and mainstream software layers such as the operating system and even the -eventual- virtualization software).

This talk will present the challenges faced by the development of communication middleware for cyber-physical systems. The focus will be on their distributed nature of CPS and on their changing architecture needs, differentiating clearly between the pure resource managers and the communication middleware. Also, some contributions and work lines towards a real-time middleware that supports the dynamic properties of these systems will be presented.
 

BIO:

Marisol García Valls is Associate Professor of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, and she is the leading researcher of the distributed real-time systems laboratory. She holds the acreditation as Full Professor by ANECA-Spain since May 2014.

Her interest research areas include reliable software technologies for distributed applications, distributed programming models, resource management and OS, performance of distributed systems, virtualization technology for predictable/reliable cloud computing, and distributed real-time systems.

She is author of numerous articles in relevant scientific venues, around 40 of them in JCR indexed journals in the above areas.

She has been enrolled in a number of European and national research projects, and has been the scientific and technical coordinator of iLAND project (EU Artemis-1-00026, 2009-2012) focused on the design and development of an enhaced communication middleware for supporting dynamic reconfiguration of real-time distributed systems based on services. She was awarded for the excellence in project coordination by the ARTEMIS JU (2012).

She was the founder of IEEE REACTION workshop on 2012 (Real-time and distributed computing in emergent applications) and of the RST track within ACM/SIGAPP SAC. Also, she has been track chair and session chair in a number of scientific events such as IEEE INDIN, ICESS and PC member in numerous events ISORC, ETFA, EstiMedia, ESOCC, ARM@MIDDLEWARE, etc.

Some selected recognitions: 2014 Prize for Outstanding International Research funded by the Social Council of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and the Salvador de Madariaga Grant for International Research Projects (PRX12/00252) granted by Spanish Ministry of Education in 2013.

She is associated editor of the Elsevier Journal of Software Architecture for the area of "Middleware" since 2013, and she is also associated editor of Future Generation Computer Systems (Q1) of Elsevier since 2014. ACM member and IEEE Senior member.