WELCOME ADDRESS
BY ERTS 2020 GENERAL CO-CHAIRS

 Alexandre Corjon, Alliance (Renault-Nissan) Global Vice President, Electrics, Electronics and Systems - France 
& Congress General C-Chair

For the second time, I have the honor to be industrial chairman for the ERTS Conference. Since 2018, the importance of Embedded systems hasn’t been decreasing and the trend that was observed is confirmed day after day. In addition, the digitalization of the industry is also continuing at high pace as every company has a risk to be disrupted by new competitors, potentially coming from other domains without the backlog of their history.

For the second time, I have the honor to be industrial chairman for the ERTS Conference. Since 2018, the importance of Embedded systems hasn’t been decreasing and the trend that was observed is confirmed day after day. In addition, the digitalization of the industry is also continuing at high pace as every company has a risk to be disrupted by new competitors, potentially coming from other domains without the backlog of their history.

Anyhow in Automotive industry or Aeronautics we are confronted to the same evolution, aiming at being more efficient, quicker in terms of time to market, more User Centric, but with a constraint which is different from Consumer Electronics: the mandatory “Safe and Secure” aspect of all systems and their related embedded software.

In Automotive, this evolution is pulled by the Autonomous Vehicle which has difficulties to be realized due to the number of real-life scenarios to be demonstrated to guarantee the safety of the system. Currently we estimate the need of 20 Peta equivalent-kilometers. This is not affordable and requires different types of strategies:

• One of them is obviously to increase the level of simulations to model all discovered use cases and apply systematically some variations in terms of conditions to transform them in generic ones.
• Another one is to limit the complexity, and therefore we have delivery of new systems having continuous increase of driving scene complexity instead of a full driverless vehicle.

The need of demonstrating the safety and security of the system is driving the speed of the deployment.

Artificial Intelligence continues to be one of the key technologies to be implemented and homologated. This is obviously used into the perception systems but also more and more in control systems. The non-deterministic approach is for sure new in our industries and a key stake. Demonstrating the safety of such systems will also be an important challenge.

Autonomous vehicle also requires having a strong interaction between on-board and off-board systems and to deal with a high amount of data either to monitor the behavior of the system in operation, or during test phases for which data ingestion and treatment is of first essence.

Cybersecurity is another domain where we foresee more and more developments. The technology we need to implement is closer and closer to the one used in data centers and forces us to have more massive and quicker updates of our vehicles while also adding some risks.  Thanks to FOTA (update over the air), the content of our vehicles will vary in time and will need to be guarantee to all regulatory authorities.

ERTS is now a very well-known convention, with people coming from almost all parts of the world with representatives from Academia to Industry teams. It is a real opportunity to exchange across domains, to share best practices, to discover roadblocks and items in research phase, to present difficulties and solutions. In this edition we have health domain representatives and agriculture ones.

The more we will attend the best will be the exchanges!

WELCOME ADDRESS 
BY ERTS 2020 TECHNICAL PROGRAMME CHAIR

 

Jean Arlat,  LAAS-CNRS, seconded from CNRS, as Scientific Advisor to the French Embassy in the UK - France

ERTS marks the 10^th edition of the Congress. It is a good opportunity to reflect on the progresses and achievements made in the development of embedded systems and also to look forward to the main trends and challenges that lie ahead.

Industrial processes and transportation have long been the core sectors that have witnessed the deployment of digitalized control and command functions for critical applications. Along the time, expertise has been built and accrued to develop (design, implement, assess and operate) embedded systems that are both resilient and timely in order to match the stringent requirements attached to such critical application domains, spanning for example nuclear and chemical plants, as well as aerospace, railways, and automobile.

The aim at providing more autonomy, flexibility and openness, as well as the demand for more cost-effective development, operator-centred exploitation and maintenance procedures results in an increasing sophistication and complexity of the functions being embedded. This is bound to necessitate research efforts for more advanced, innovative and adaptive (hardware and software) solutions as well as comprehensive and rigorous assessment approaches to cope with the high-level of resilience and timeliness that is to be achieved.

Thanks to the progress made in the context of such pioneering application domains and to the technological advances allowing for more powerful and smarter digital components and building-blocks, the pervasive deployment of computerized systems has progressively stretched to an unprecedented outreach in the various facets of our everyday life. New frontiers are being explored that encompass for example, domestic appliances, e-health, smart cities, advanced manufacturing, future farming technology, etc. People are becoming more and more involved. They are now able to seamlessly: i) communicate among them via personal devices and ii) interact with the environment. The networking infrastructures (telecommunication networks, the Internet, industrial and home networks), as well as the data processing capabilities are being merged or at least significantly interwoven. This trend builds up and further elaborates on the so-called Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things paradigms. In such a context, one has the ability to sense, measure and analyse the actual condition of virtually everything.

While application-level safety remains the ultimate key matter, this rapidly evolving context and the related trend have given rise to a wider range of concerns and challenges that go beyond real-time and data integrity issues. In particular, to allow for an efficient adaptation to changes, they should encompass: achieving transparency in the data analysis and decision processes, ensuring security as well as privacy, providing fast and precise prediction of the actual status of the system (including in the presence of accidental or deliberate faults) as well as the optimization of resources.

Being a leading European cross-sector event for embedded resilient and timely systems, that has been gathering, for almost two decades, researchers, engineers and professionals from a wide variety of application domains, ERTS is a unique forum for building up upon the accrued insight and awareness in coping with a wide range of cross-domain issues and for paving the way to address future challenges and investigate innovative solutions.

I am looking forward for you to join us in Toulouse to celebrate the 10^th edition of the ERTS Congress!