ENACT: Development, Operation, and Quality Assurance of Trustworthy Smart IoT Systems

The ENACT project will enable DevOps in the realm of trustworthy smart IoT sytems, espeacially in the application fields eHealth, Smart City and smart transportation systems.


In the near future, the amount of Internet-Of-Things (IoT) endpoints is predicted to further increase, offering opportunities as well as introducing many challenges. Until now IoT innovations were mainly about sensoring, device management and connectivity to gather and aggregate data for processing in the cloud. However, these aspects do not unleash the full potential of IoT. Therefore, in the next generation IoT systems should perform distributed processing and coordinated behaviour across IoT, edge and cloud infrastructures as well as managing the closed loop from sensing to actuation. This also includes the handling of heterogeneity and scalability as well as the mastering of a highly dynamic environment of the IoT systems. Apart from this there are mainly aspects concerning security and privacy being of high importance. Therefore, IoT systems coping these aspects are called trustworthy smart IoT system, or for short: trustworthy SIS. The operation of such systems in the application-domains of eHealth, smart city and intelligent transport systems is hence needed.

To cope with the associated challenges of the deployment of trustworthy SIS in highly dynamic environments, adequate software engineering techniques are required. One approach trying to tackle the assurance of quality of service during a continuous development of complex systems while also trying to preserve agility, rapid innovation cycles and ease of use, is DevOps. However, DevOps is not readily suitable for trustworthy SIS. Especially the high amount of devices, dynamic topologies, unreliable connections and heterogeneity are complicating the continuous debugging and testing of IoT-systems. Furthermore current DevOps-approaches are lacking in mechanism for the continuous quality assurance, for example, mechanisms for end-to-end security and privacy as well as mechanisms being able to take into consideration open context. Opportunities for the continuous deployment and the evolution of IoT systems in IoT, edge- and cloud spaces are also often missing.

The ENACT project will enable DevOps in the realm of trustworthy smart IoT sytems. ENACT will provide an integrated DevOps Framework composed of a set of loosely coupled enablers that can be easily integrated with existing IoT platforms via plug in mechanism. The ENACT enablers are categorized in three groups as follows: (i) the toolkit for the continuous delivery of smart IoT systems, (ii) the toolkit for the agile operation of smart IoT systems, and (iii) the ENACT facilities for trustworthiness. The set of enablers can be seamlessly combined and they can easily integrate with existing IoT platform services and enablers.

In ENACT, paluno is responsible for the working package “Trustworthy & Agile Operation of Smart IoT Systems”, which will develop principles, techniques and methods for the operation of smart IoT systems in a trustworthy and agile fashion. This especially includes the design and prototypical implementation of machine-learning based mechanisms that enable run-time adaption of IoT systems to adapt the systems to dynamic environments.

Funding

Funded by: European Union (EU)

Program: Horizon 2020

Type: Research and Innovation Action (RIA)

Funding: 420,000 EUR (Total Funded Amount 4.93 Mil. Euro)

Duration: 01/2018 - 03/2021

Partners

  • SINTEF
  • Beawre
  • Evidian
  • Indra
  • Tecnalia
  • TellU
  • CNRS
  • paluno, Universität Duisburg-Essen
  • ISRAA
  • BOSC
  • EDI

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 780351.