The 7th ADMORPH Consortium Meeting took place from the 6th to the 8th February, in Augsburg, Germany.

During the meeting it was possible to address ongoing activities, present the status of demonstrations being prepared, and discuss technical aspects in detail, during break-out sessions involving different sets of partners.

As usual, the meeting also contributed to reinforce the team spirit, namely over coffee-breaks and lunches.

We are now looking forward for the final meetings and final project review!!

The ADMORPH project was present at the HiPEAC 2022 Conference, which took place in Budapest, Hungary, from 20 to 22 of June.

ADMORPH posters were visible in the coffee-break area throughout the entire event, while an ADMORPH flyer highlighting the project vision, objective, use cases and architecture and technologies, was distributed to HiPEAC participants.

Furthermore, on June 20 the project participated in the DL4IoT workshop, with a presentation given by Stafanos Skalistis.

ADMORPH had a strong presence in the organization of a panel session at the ASD Autonomous Systems Design initiative, in the scope of the DATE 2021 conference. The session, under the theme “Self-adaptive safety- and mission-critical CPS: wishful thinking or absolute necessity?” was organized by ADMORPH researchers Martina Maggio and Andy Pimentel. It took place on the 5th of February, by video-conference, and attracted the attention of about 60 participants. Speakers (or panelist) on the program were Stefanos Skalistis (Raytheon Technologies, Ireland), talking about “Certification challenges of adaptive avionics systems”, and Clemens Grelck (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), presenting “The TeamPlay Coordination Language for Dependable Systems”. The third speaker in the panel was Sasa Misailovic (from UIUC), talking about “Programming Systems for Helping Developers Cope with Uncertainty”. The panel session resulted in a lively discussion about what adaptation can do, how to test it, and how to certify the results.

Within the ADMORPH project, we are looking at how systems respond to failures and cyber-attacks. Our aim is to create a new generation of embedded systems. These new systems should be able to react to faults and attacks, by adapting and morphing themselves. One key component to realise this vision is to understand how these systems behave when they are experiencing a fault or an attack and what are their limitations.

To this end we started studying what happens to control systems when the controller misses some deadlines. This could happen when the system is under attack, due to the malicious action of the attacker. It could also simply happens because of a transient hardware failure.

In particular, we have been looking at systems where the controller can miss up to a specific number n of consecutive deadlines. Our aim was to assess the robustness of these systems, and their ability to perform well despite the problems. We started our investigation with the assumption that control systems are very robust. Usually their robustness makes them resilient to disturbances and environmental fluctuations. We set off to prove when they are robust to computational problems too.

The result of our investigation is a stability criterion. We can determine the maximum number of consecutive deadline misses that do not harm the system. This means that the controlled system remains stable despite computational sequences of hits and misses, with the constraint that the system cannot experience more than n misses in a row.

The results of our study are described in a paper that is going to be presented in July at the Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS). A paper preprint is available.