Welcome Astrium to the Polarsys Working Group

Today we want to welcome Astrium, Europe's No. 1 space company, as a new industrial user to Polarsys.

Part of the international EADS Group, Astrium is the only European space company that covers the entire space business, from civil and defense systems to services and applications.

The 18,000-plus employees of Astrium are all driven by the same ambition: to make space technology work for everybody. Their skills, energy and entrepreneurial spirit have contributed to the success of many of the most important projects in space, including Ariane, the International Space Station, Envisat, Mars Express and Skynet 5.

We are very happy to have this company now in the steering committee of Polarsys and look forward to their contributions!

Polarsys Members Update

I would like to update you on companies that have joined the Polarsys Industry Working Group (IWG) just recently.

First I would like to welcome Intecs SpA from Pisa, Italy. Intecs has joined the IWG already in the fall of 2012 as a participant member. 

Intecs is the first Italian Company to join this initiative with the purpose to promote the adoption of the open source technology in  the Italian industry. In addition, Intecs plans also to migrate the technology and innovation created by the ARTEMIS CHESS project to Polarsys.

In 2013, CEA List has joined Polarsys as a steering committee member.  Located at the heart of Saclay area (Paris region), the CEA LIST Institute focuses its research activities on developing innovative technologies for smart and complex systems. Its R&D programmes, with potentially major economic and social implications, centre on interactive systems (ambient intelligence), embedded systems (architecture, software and systems engineering), sensors and signal processing (industrial control systems, health, security and metrology).

Dedicated to technological research, CEA LIST’s more than 700 researchers and technicians strive to encourage innovation and technology transfer through long-term industrial partnerships. The dynamism of the Institute's teams, their project-based culture and their consistently high standard of scientific excellence underpin this objective.

CEA LIST’s development is rooted in a global ecosystem, ranging from its upstream research partnerships to European and international collaborative ventures.

Also joining in January 2013 is AtoS as a participant member. AtoS is well known as a big IT services worldwide company, but it has also strong expertise in embedded and critical software with thousands people developing them for different business domains including aeronautics, space, automotive, railway and energy.

AtoS develops embedded software but also methods and tools that support them and is especially the main contributor of TOPCASED open platform (model based system engineering) and a recognized expert in formal verification of C Code with several contributions on Frama-C platform.

For all those reasons it was obvious that AtoS would join PolarSys as this industrial working group is expected to become the major place for open source tooling supporting embedded systems and software on the very long term.

Assessing the components ecosystem of Polarsys

Software development companies are betting on open-source software (OSS) in order to keep them competitive in the market. This bet does not just alleviate the economic costs required by IT solutions but it also introduces benefits such as flexibility or the reduction of software development time.  Surveys taken in the last five years by Garner, Inc show an increase adoption in OSS solutions on organizations’ IT strategy to the detriment of proprietary software. Even though this adoption does not mean that OSS solutions will substitute proprietary ones (in fact, OSS are commonly acquired to complement existing proprietary software), companies seen already OSS as a clear alternative, when possible, to existing proprietary solutions.

This change is happening in general in the software development industry, no matter the application domain. However, in some domains, this change is taking long due to migration, interoperability, or extensibility problems among others. Examples of such domains are: aerospace, defense and security, energy or healthcare. These domains demand critical software whose development requires a long life-cycle, usually lasting more than ten years. However, in this scenario, we hardly find support for proprietary solutions. In this case, OSS arises as a potential solution for innovation and better support.

Within this context, the OPEES ITEA 2 project was born with the objective of settling a community and building the necessary means and enablers to ensure long-term availability of innovative engineering technologies in the domain of dependable/critical software-intensive embedded systems. One of the major outcomes of the project is the Polarsys Eclipse Industry Working Group and the set of services offered within the Polarsys infrastructure. 

This infrastructure has been conceived as an ecosystem for open source components aimed at the development of embedded systems for such domains. Such an ecosystem will be provided in the infrastructure as a catalogue of components. Such components will not just be hosted in the infrastructure but also assessed so that any member of the Polarsys community can have a better understanding and use of such components. This assessment has been materialized by means of a quality meta-model which has been designed and implemented within the context of the OPEES project. The meta-model allows representing what can be assessed in a component and how (see figure 1), component assessment values (see figure 2), and who recommends a certain component (see figure 3). 

Briefly, the first part of the meta-model allows gathering information about the different metrics that can be used in each domain according to the applicable standards. Such metrics are obtained by computing (algorithm4valuation) the set of related attributes.

Figura 1

The second part of the meta-model allows gathering assessments of different components according to existing metrics. This assessment (represented by the Measurement class) is performed on a specific component (ComponentVersion) given a particular metric.

Figura 2

Finally, Polarsys members can make comments and recommendations over existing components. This information is gathered in this latter part of the meta-model shown in figure 3.

Figura 3

Such meta-model has been implemented by Atos as a service within the Polarsys infrastructure. This service is offered as a web and a desktop application. Both have been implemented using gPM, an open source tool included in the TOPCASED toolkit. Figure 4 shows a screen shot of the web application showing the functionality for adding a metric.

Figura 4

Polarsys meeting in Ludwigsburg on October 22nd

On Monday October 22nd, the day before Eclipse Con Europe, we will have our second Polarsys meeting at the Ludwigsburg Forum!

This meeting is open to all people interested in Polarsys, and we will take the opportunity to organize a common session with the Auto IWG.

Here is our agenda for this meeting:
* 10:00 - 11:00: Polarsys General Assembly & Polarsys status : membership, activities, Top Level Project Proposal, upcoming projects proposals
* 11:00 - 12:00: Feedback from the first Steering and Architecture committee
* 12:00: Lunch
* 13:30 - 15:00: Roadmap for next 6 months & Creation of working groups (Branding, , Polarsys Packaging Project, ...)
* 15:15 - 17:00: Common meeting with Automotive IWG (Scalability and collaboration) (TOPICS TO BE CONFIRMED)


For logistic reasons, we need to know the number of people who plan to participate to this meeting so please register on the doodle: http://doodle.com/ut4t4b3iwdkfsm4m.

Additionally, you should register for the Eclipse Con Europe which is in the same location from Oct 23rd to Oct 25th. Registration is available at: http://www.eclipsecon.org/europe2012


We look forward to see you at the Ludwigsburg Forum on October 22nd.

Announcing the Eclipse Day Toulouse on May 24th

Capitole, Toulouse 

The European Eclipse community is glad to invite you in Toulouse on May 24th for an Eclipse Day.

In the spirit of the former Eclipse Days in Toulouse we proudly announce an great line-up of speakers talking about

• News from Eclipse, with a presentation of e4,  Tycho
• Eclipse for IT with Talend, JBoss tools, eGit, Gerrit
• Embedded Systems development with presentations abouts Polarsys, Topcased, the Auto IWG, Eclipse Modeling
• M2M with Paho, MQTT, Koneki, to understand the role of Eclipse in the domain of the Internet of Things
• Case studies about the Business Models around Eclipse.

Have a look at the program on the EDT 2012 web site and register quickly.

Thanks to our sponsors, the fee for this whole conference day event is only 20€.


PS: If you don't live in Toulouse, we advice you to make your hotel reservations as soon as possible. Many people know that Toulouse is a wonderful city at the end of May and hotels look already a bit packed.

Looking forward to seeing you in Toulouse,
Gaël Blondelle and the Eclipse Day Toulouse program committee

Picture: Wikimedia Commons

Invitation to Polarsys open meeting co-located with Eclipse Con

We are pleased to invite you to an information and discussion meeting about Polarsys in Reston (Virginia) during the Eclipse Con (http://www.eclipsecon.org) on Wednesday 28th March, at Hyatt Regency Reston, in Room Lake Fairfax B, from 1:30 to 4:30.
Due to the limited number of places, registration is mandatory to participate to the meeting - http://polarsys-econ.eventbrite.com
 
The goal of Polarsys is to organize the open source and business ecosystem around tools for the development of dependable embedded systems in order to create better tooling and to enable long term support for these tools.
Polarsys focuses on four main topics (see http://wiki.eclipse.org/Polarsys/Proposal):

• Open Innovation to create better methods and tools
• Computer Assistance and Automation with focus on Model Based System Engineering
• Certification to ease the tools qualification in complex certification processes
• Very Long Term Support to assure  Embedded Systems and tools maintenance for 40 years or more

Polarsys addresses the whole Embedded software tool chain, from Model Based System Engineering with Topcased, to code analysis (Frama-C) or simulation engine (Unisim). For example, the Topcased project will move to Polarsys during year 2012.

If you are interested in the technologies Polarsys aims to develop, we suggest you attend Eclipse Con 2012 (http://www.eclipsecon.org/2012/registration), as the best experts of the domain will present their work and cutting edge products at this occasion.

For more information on Polarsys, please visit the Polarsys website.

Looking forward to meeting you there.
Do not hesitate to contact us if you need more information and please spread the word about this meeting.

Best regards,
Gaël Blondelle - gael.blondelle_at_obeo_dot_fr
Pierre Gaufillet - pierre.gaufillet_at_airbus_dot_com
Benoît Langlois - benoit.langlois_at_thalesgroup_dot_com
Ralph Mueller - ralph.mueller_at_eclipse_dot_org

Face-to-Face Meeting Bilbao

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao

We would like to make you aware of the upcoming PolarSys meeting in Bilbao on March 13 and 14.

Detailed information about the meeting can be found at the PolarSys Wiki. Please send an email to the PolarSys mailing list if you would like to add specific topics to the agenda and don't forget to register yourself for attendance.

PS: Plan some time before or after to visit the Guggenheim Museum and the Bilbao old city!

Ralph Mueller
Eclipse Foundation