CISTER researchers Luis Lino Ferreira and Michele Albano co-authored several chapters of the book “IoT Automation: Arrowhead Framework”, which will be published in February, 2017 by CRC Press. This book presents an in-depth description of the Arrowhead Framework and how it fosters interoperability between IoT devices at service level. This Framework is structured on the SOA technology and the concept of local cloud. The objective is to provide several automation capabilities such as: real time control, security, scalability, and engineering simplicity. The Arrowhead Framework supports the realization of collaborative automation; and it is the only IoT Framework that addresses global interoperability across multiple SOA technologies and therefore enabling the design, engineering, and operation of large automation systems for a wide range of applications utilizing IoT and CPS technologies.

The book provides application examples from a wide number of industrial fields e.g. airline maintenance, mining maintenance, smart production, electro-mobility, automotive test, smart cities—all in response to EU societal challenges.

Recently, a General Meeting of the Arrowhead project took place at the High Speed Sustainable Manufacturing Institute, London. Arrowhead is the European effort to apply the Service Oriented Approach (SOA) to Embedded Systems by both streamlining the design of services, and providing a framework to support service development. The Arrowhead project is now in its last year. The meeting had the twofold goal of enabling demonstrators' owners to use the capabilities of the current implementation of the Arrowhead Framework, and to discuss the evolution of the framework.

CISTER work is converging on extending the publish/subscribe paradigm to SOA, and on QoS-as-a-Service. Michele Albano represented CISTER in the meeting and led the session on QoS. The discussion considered how QoS can be applied to orchestrate services in a local cloud, and the Arrowhead partners agreed on CISTER's proposal for an architecture supporting the QoS functionalities. Later, the discussion came to a novel topic, QoS for distributed systems obeying the "cloud of clouds" design, and the Arrowhead partners will be driven by CISTER while investigating this new research line.

The ARTEMIS spring event was co-located with the CPS week in Vienna. ARTEMIS/ECSEL is an important avenue for conducting pan-European research with immense potential towards generating IP in industrial domains, a strong focus and strength of Europe.

During the event the Strategic research agenda was released and discussed. Nearly 150 participants came together to also learn about and discuss highlights of Cyber-Physical Systems projects from Horizon2020 and ARTEMIS. ECSEL projects with CISTER involvement, Arrowhead and MANTIS, were also presented. CISTER researchers Raghuraman Rangarajan and Eduardo Tovar participated in this event.

CISTER Researchers Luis Miguel Pinho, Luis Lino Ferreira and Raghuraman Rangarajan represented the research centre in the ICT 2015 conference. The conference, held in Lisbon, promotes European ICT Research & Innovation and presented the latest news on the European Commission's new policies and initiatives with regard to R&I in ICT and interactive exhibitions on EU projects.

The event offered an exceptional opportunity to build quality partnerships as it connected academia, research institutes, industrial stakeholders, SMEs and government actors from all over Europe. Luis Lino Ferreira also represented the Arrowhead project at its booth and was a speaker in the networking session on "IoT based automation for production", where he represented the MANTIS project.

CISTER Researchers Luis Lino Ferreira, Geoffrey Nelissen, Eduardo Tovar and Luis Miguel Pinho participated in the 2015 Artemis/ITEA Co-summit held in Berlin. They were representing CISTER as members of several ongoing and finalized European projects, namely: EMC2, CONCERTO, Arrowhead, ENCOURAGE, CarCode and P-SOCRATES.

The Co-summit 2015 organized by ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking on embedded systems and ITEA, the EUREKA Cluster on software-intensive systems and services – counted about 700 participants from industry, academia, public authorities and press from all over Europe. This year's theme was: Smart Industry: Impact of Software Innovation.

During this event, Eduardo Tovar participated in the Artemis General Assembly and the election for the Artemis Steering Board as a candidate. Luis Miguel Pinho was invited to present a talk in the Speakers Corner on Mixed Criticality related to the actual status of the CISTER-lead European project P-SOCRATES. Geoffrey Nelissen represented CISTER in the CONCERTO booth and Luis Lino Ferreira was also representing CISTER in the CarCode and Arrowhead booths.
Finally, Luis Miguel Pinho and Luis Lino Ferreira, together with the ENCOURAGE project leader Arne Skou, received the achievement award for the successful finalization of the ENCOURAGE project.