Benny Åkesson from Embedded Systems Innovation by TNO, Netherlands, gave a distinguished seminar titled "PROGNOSIS - Reducing Design Time and Promoting Evolvability through Virtual Prototyping". In the talk, and the follow-up discussion, he introduced the research project PROGNOSIS -- a 3-year joint effort between TNO and Thales -- and presented a general vision on improving the development process of complex fire control systems by using model-based design (MBD).
Benny Åkesson received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, on the topic of real-time memory controllers. During the following five years, Benny extended this work as a Researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology, Czech Technical University in Prague, and at CISTER. Since 2016, he is employed as a Research Fellow at Embedded Systems Innovation by TNO (TNO-ESI) in Eindhoven, where he is doing applied science in an industrial setting. His research interests include platform architectures, real-time resource scheduling, performance virtualization, and virtual prototyping. He is the author of more than 50 peer-reviewed international publications and two books about memory controllers for real-time embedded systems.

Mitra Nasri from Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Germany, gave a distinguished seminar titled "Offline Equivalence: A Non-Preemptive Scheduling Technique for Resource-Constrained Embedded Real-Time Systems". She presented an online policy that is equivalent to a given offline table to combine some of the advantages of both online and offline scheduling.

Mitra Nasri is a post-doc at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and holder of a fellowship from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She works on real-time scheduling and schedulability analysis, non-preemptive and limited preemptive scheduling, algorithm design, real-time control systems, and parameter assignment and optimization problems. Before being a part of MPI-SWS, she was a post-doc at the Chair of Real-Time Systems in Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Tehran (Iran). During her Ph.D., she was also a visiting researcher in Technische Universität Kaiserslautern.

CISTER researcher Anis Koubâa, in an editorial role, has released a new Springer book on Robot operating systems. The book titled, “Robot Operating System (ROS) – The Complete Reference (Volume 2)” focuses on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with ROS.

The results of the last review meeting of the Arrowhead project are now available and couldn’t have been better. Arrowhead has been classified as excellent, signifying that “it has fully achieved its objectives and technical goals and has even exceeded expectations”.

The Arrowhead main objective was to provide a Service Oriented Approach (SOA) to Embedded Systems by both streamlining the design of services, and providing a framework to support service development.

The exploitation results were considered impressive, with the reviewers acknowledging the quality of the industrial pilots, which demonstrated an in-depth approach of the Arrowhead framework applicability. Supported by the results achieved in Arrowhead, partners already have more than 10 products in the market, and four startup companies were also initiated. Dissemination results were also of high standards with the publication of the “IoT Automation: Arrowhead Framework” book by CRC Press and several high quality publications. Additionally, the project supported the establishment of business cooperation among some of the participating companies, which goes beyond the traditional expected cooperation of industry-academia.

During these four years, the project counted with the participation of several CISTER researchers, namely Luis Lino Ferreira (project leader), Michele Albano, Paulo Barbosa, Renato Ayres, José Silva, Filipe Pacheco, César Teixeira, Ricardo Garibay-Martinez among others.

ISEP and CISTER will proudly organise the next CPSWeek 2018. The 11th edition of the week long multiple conference event will have more than 700 participants. In Europe, CPSWeek has been conducted before in three major technological hubs in the area of CPS: Stockholm (2010), Berlin (2014) and Vienna (2016). Porto, ISEP and CISTER will be at the centre of the World in Cyber-Physical Systems, with the whole set of opportunities and challenges this will bring to us, to the city and the country. The CPSWeek 2018 will probably be one of the largest and most important IT-related events to ever take place in Porto.