CPS

Cyber-Physical Systems

New paper on Railway Digital Twins and Artificial Intelligence

2022-09-13

We are pleased to announce that the paper entitled “Railway Digital Twins and Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Design Guidelines“, whose main author is LNU student Ruth Dirnfeld, has been published on the Springer book of proceedings of the AI4RAILS workshop. We congratulate Ruth for her second international publication, which demonstrates her capability to develop novel and interesting contributions. The work has been carried on within the RAILS EU funded research project.

Book cover

RAILS Project: first deliverable and dissemination results

2020-09-23

Dear Colleagues,
I would like to inform you that the RAILS project has produced its first deliverable that can be downloaded from:
As part of project dissemination activities, we have organized the 1st International Workshop on “Artificial Intelligence for RAILwayS” (AI4RAILS):

https://sites.google.com/view/ai4rails/home-page

The Springer proceedings of AI4RAILS are available at:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-58462-7
and can be downloaded for a limited time (until October 1st 2020) from:
http://edcc.dependability.org/EDCC2020%20WS%20Proceedings%20978-3-030-58462-7.pdf

 

Finally, the paper entitled “Low-Power Wide-Area Networks in Intelligent Transportation: Review and Opportunities for Smart-Railways”, co-authored with Linnaeus University master student Ruth Dirnfeld, has been recently presented at the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC) according to the following updated program:

https://its.papercept.net/conferences/conferences/ITSC20/program/ITSC20_ContentListWeb_3.html

Presentation slides are available on slideshare.

 

Any feedback on all those initiatives and preliminary results is very much appreciated!

 

Prof. Francesco Flammini

RAILS Technical Manager, AI4RAILS Co-Chair

 

 

Paper on Self-Adaptive Trust-Aware Decentralized Information Flow Control accepted at 1st IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems

2020-07-11

Congratulations to Charilaos, Narges and Jesper for their paper being accepted at the 1st IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS 2020)!

Please find below additional information about their research.

Title: Self-Adaptive Trust-Aware Decentralized Information Flow Control
Authors: Charilaos Skandylas, Narges Khakpour, Jesper Andersson

Abstract:
Modern software systems and their corresponding
architectures are decentralized, distributed, and dynamic. As
a consequence, decentralized mechanisms are also required to
ensure security in such architectures. Decentralized Information
Flow Control (DIFC) is a mechanism to control information
flow in distributed systems. However, DIFC mechanisms require
the resolution of specific centralized control and trust issues. In
this paper, we propose an adaptive, trust-aware, decentralized
information flow approach that incorporates trust in DIFC for
decentralized systems. We employ decentralized feedback loops
to enable decentralized control and adaptive trust assignments.
In our approach, adaptivity mitigates two aspects of systems
dynamics that cause uncertainty: the ever-changing nature of
trust and the system openness. We formalize our trust-aware
DIFC model and instantiate two decentralized feedback loop
architectures to implement it. We discuss the design and implementation
considerations and evaluate the effectiveness of
adaptive trust-aware DIFC on a set of decentralized architectures
and a microservices-based system.

Link to full text

Paper on IoT Self-Healing accepted at 30th European Safety and Reliability Conference

2020-04-06

The paper entitled “Towards Self-Healing in the Internet of Things by Log Analytics and Process Mining” (Singh PJ. Flammini F, Caporuscio M, Saman Azari M, Thornadtsson J) has been accepted for presentation at the 30th European Safety and Reliability Conference and 15th Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management Conference (ESREL2020-PSAM15), to be held in Venice, Italy on June 21-26 2020, and publication in the conference book of proceedings.

Link to the paper on Researchgate:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340463720_Towards_Self-Healing_in_the_Internet_of_Things_by_Log_Analytics_and_Process_Mining

UPDATE November 2020:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fflammini_internetofthingsiot-selfhealing-processmining-activity-6729761917826547712-_ZHk

 

New workshop on Artificial Intelligence for RAILwayS (AI4RAILS) accepted at European Dependable Computing Conference

2020-03-19

AI4RAILS – 1st International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for RAILwayS

Organizers:
Workshop chairs: Stefano Marrone (University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy), Roberto Nardone (Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria, Reggio Calabria, Italy)
Workshop series steering committee chairs: Francesco Flammini (Mälardalen University and Linnaeus University, Sweden), Valeria Vittorini (University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy)

The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques on industry has been so disruptive that it gave rise to a new wave of research and applications. Several industries, mainly in logistics and manufacturing, have benefited significantly from AI adoption and this positive trend is planned to be kept in the future. Modern and future railways represent one of the fields in which AI is expected to have a significant impact in a medium to long term perspective, in order to get higher levels of automation. On the one hand, this opens for unprecedented scenarios for railway systems, but on the other hand, it also raises concerns regarding system dependability and new threats associated with a high level of autonomy. Therefore, the first step towards the adoption of AI in the railway sector is understanding to what extent AI can be considered reliable, safe and secure. In such a context, building upon the ongoing Shift2Rail project RAILS (Roadmaps for the AI integration in the raiL Sector), the aim of the 1st AI4RAILS workshop is to provide a forum for researchers, practitioners and business leaders to discuss and share new perspectives, ideas, technologies and solutions for an effective and dependable integration of AI techniques in rail-based transportation systems.

Co-located with 16th European Dependable Computing Conference, 7-10 September 2020, Munich, Germany:

http://edcc.dependability.org/workshops.html

Paper on Data-Driven Fault Diagnosis to be presented at 4th International Conference on System Reliability and Safety (sponsored by IEEE)

2019-11-04

The paper entitled “Data-Driven Fault Diagnosis of Once-Through Benson Boilers” (Mehdi Saman Azari, Francesco Flammini, Stefania Santini, Mauro Caporuscio) will be presented at the 4th International Conference on System Reliability and Safety (ICSRS’19), sponsored by the IEEE, which will be held in Rome (Italy) on November 20-22, 2019.

The new PhD student Mehdi Saman Azari will attend the conference and present the paper, which will be published in the IEEE Digital Library.

Congratulations to Mehdi for his first paper as a PhD student at LNU!

 

Abstract

Fault Diagnosis (FD) of once-through Benson boilers, as a crucial equipment of many thermal power plants, is of paramount importance to guarantee continuous performance. In this study, a new fault diagnosis methodology based on data-driven methods is presented to diagnose faults in once-through Benson boilers. The present study tackles this issue by adopting a combination of data-driven methods to improve the robustness of FD blocks. For this purpose, one-class versions of minimum spanning tree and K-means algorithms are employed to handle the strong interaction between measurements and part load operation and also to reduce computation time and system training error. Furthermore, an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system algorithm is adopted to improve accuracy and robustness of the proposed fault diagnosing system by fusion of the output of minimum spanning tree (MST) and K-means algorithms. Performance of the presented scheme against six major faults is then assessed by analyzing several test scenarios.

 

UPDATE February 17th 2020

The paper is now available in the IEEE Digital Library and accessible at the following link:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8987699

 

Research on intelligent cybersecurity at IEEE SMC 2019

2019-07-29

The paper entitled “A Review of Intelligent Cybersecurity with Bayesian Networks” (Mauro Pappaterra, Francesco Flammini) has been accepted for conference presentation and publication in the proceedings of the 2019 IEEE SMC international conference, i.e. the flagship event of the  IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics society, special session on Homeland Security: Tools and Methodologies.

The paper will be presented by master student Mauro Pappaterra, who has been granted registration costs and travel expenses by the Department of Computer Science and Media Technology.

 

Abstract

Cybersecurity threats have surged in the past decades. Experts agree that conventional security measures will soon not be enough to stop the propagation of more sophisticated and harmful cyberattacks. Recently, there has been a growing interest in mastering the complexity of cybersecurity by adopting methods borrowed from Artificial Intelligence (AI) in order to support automation. In this paper, we provide a brief survey and some hints about Bayesian Network applications to intelligent cybersecurity in order to enable quantitative threat assessment for superior risk analysis and situation awareness.

See also:

https://lnu.se/en/meet-linnaeus-university/current/news/2019/research-on-intelligent-cyber-security-to-be-presented-at-ieee-conference/

 

UPDATE, August 20th 2019

Mauro has also been selected as “Student or Young Professional Travel Grant Winner” for the SMC 2019 conference.

 

UPDATE, October 7th 2019

A picture of Mauro’s presentation:

 

UPDATE, December 2nd 2019

The paper is finally available from IEEE Digital Library at the following link:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8913864

Plain text citation:

M. J. Pappaterra and F. Flammini, “A Review of Intelligent Cybersecurity with Bayesian Networks,” 2019 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC), Bari, Italy, 2019, pp. 445-452.
doi: 10.1109/SMC.2019.8913864
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8913864&isnumber=8913838

IoT tech day August 29th

2019-06-26

Who said that Internet of Things has to be difficult? Linnaeus University and Kalmar Energi invites you to an inspirational day with the theme IoT. The researchers from the CPS-group are co-organizing the event.

During the inspirational day, we will showcase various uses and give ideas for new business opportunities using Internet of Things. This is interesting not least because it is now possible to use an open IoT network in Kalmar to freely test and develop.

The IoT technology is now so simple and, most importantly, cheap that all that is required is a little time and interest in turning ideas into reality.

The inspirational day will also be broadcast live on the Internet. The link will be announced later. The presentations will be held in both Swedish and English.

For more information about the program, speakers, how to register and the follow-up workshops please see the event website.

//Diana

 

UPDATE August 30th 2019

Pictures taken from the talk of the invited speaker Dr. Usman Raza (Principal Research Engineer, Toshiba Research Europe Ltd)

Slides about IoT Research & Education at LNU:

Flammini_IoT_Kalmar_2019

Post-Event News (in Swedish)

Talk: Towards Secure Architectural Adaptation at SEAMS 2019

2019-05-26

A few of our researchers are now in Montreal, Canada for SEAMS 2019 (Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems 2019 conference). The objective of SEAMS is to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas to investigate, discuss, and examine the fundamental principles, the state of the art, and critical challenges of engineering self-adaptive and self-managing systems.

On Sunday May 26th, Narges Khakpour will give a presentation of the paper entitled Towards Secure Architectural Adaptation (authored by: Narges Khakpour, Charilaos Skandylas, Goran Saman Nariman, and Danny Weyns), accepted for publication in the book of proceedings of the conference.

As any software system, a self-adaptive system is subject to security threats. However, applying self-adaptation may introduce additional threats. So far, little research has been devoted to this important problem. In this paper, we propose an approach for vulnerability analysis of architecture-based adaptations in self-adaptive systems using threat modeling and analysis techniques. To this end, we specify components’ vulnerabilities and the system architecture formally and generate an attack model that describes the attacker’s strategies to attack the system when adaptation is applied by exploiting different vulnerabilities. We use a set of security metrics to quantitatively assess the security risks of adaptations based on the produced attack model which enables the system to consider security aspects while choosing an adaptation to apply to the system. We automate and incorporate our approach into the Rainbow framework, allowing for secure architectural adaptations at runtime. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we apply it on a simple document storage system and on the ZNN system.

For more information please click here.

Co-charing the industry/project dissemination session at CRITIS 2019

2019-05-17

The 14th International Conference on Critical Information Infrastructures Security, CRITIS 2019, will be held in Linköping on September 23-25 2019.

CRITIS 2019 aims at bringing together researchers, professionals from academia, critical (information) infrastructure operators, industry, defence sector and governmental organisations working in the field of the security of critical (information) infrastructure systems. Moreover, CRITIS aims to encourage and inspire early stage and open-minded researchers in this demanding multi-disciplinary field of research.

Francesco Flammini, Senior Lecturer at Linnaeus University, is a part of the Technical Committee of the conference and will be co-charing the industry/project dissemination session.

For more information about the conference, see the conference website.

 

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS — Industrial/practical experience reports

https://critis2019.on.liu.se/CFP-CRITIS2019-IndExp.pdf

Critical infrastructures must fulfil dependability requirements that impose the use of rigorous techniques during procurement, development, commissioning and training/preparedness, as well as in regulatory audits of the operational systems.

In this CRITIS special session we solicit short presentations from an industrial perspective addressing any aspect of such processes and of the supervision of critical operations. Reports of actual cases are welcome including success stories or failure/emergency management operations with the aim of sharing lessons learnt. Contributions to this session are also welcome by academics working on research projects with industrial partners who have driven experimental evaluations of research outcomes and prototypes with the help of real-world data, or have validated hypotheses by performing surveys and interviews.

The submissions in this session have the following characteristics:

  • Papers of 1-2 pages in length (including references and figures), using the Springer format.
  • The submissions are NOT anonymised
  • The title of the submission must include the words “Industry/Experience report”

The submissions in this session will be evaluated by the two session chairs:

  • Sokratis K. Katsikas (NTNU, Norway & Open University of Cyprus, Cyprus)
  • Francesco Flammini (Linnaeus University, Sweden)

The final versions of the contributions (reflecting the comments by the session chairs and necessary improvements) will be shown on the conference web page and presented during the conference, and can be later extended and published in other venues.

Important dates:

  • Submission deadline: 9th June 2019
  • Notification of acceptance: 20th June 2019
  • Final version submission: 9th September 2019

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 23rd 2019

Final program

CRITIS 2019_Smart-Troubleshooting_POSTER

 

UPDATE DECEMBER 22nd 2019

The industry session white paper has been published in CRITIS’19 conference proceedings and it is now accessible here.