Active Research Topics
Smart Infrastructures
The future in many industrial domains is shaped by what is called Smart Infrastructures, which employ ICT to enrich (often existing) physical infrastructures with new intelligence. A prominent example is the so called Smart Grid, which brings this innovation to the energy domain. Within this project, we devise methods to analyse and simulate various smart infrastructures with the aim of assisting in their design and development. In this field are large contract research projects with ČEZ, ČSRES.
Contact: Tomáš Pitner, Bruno Rossi, Barbora Bühnová
Antifragile Critical Infrastructure Systems
Antifragility, which is an evolutionary understanding of resilience, has become a predominant concept in academic and industrial fields as the criticality of vital infrastructures (like healthcare and transportation) has become more flexible and varying due the impact of digitization and adverse circumstances, such as changing the prioritization of industrial services. Within this project, we aim at analyzing the fragilities of software systems and develop models for improving the protection of critical infrastructures.
Contact: Hind Bangui, Barbora Bühnová, Bruno Rossi
Smart Cities
One of the promising emerging contexts where ICT (Information and Communication Technology) meets Service Science, is the context of Smart Cities. In a Smart City, ICT plays a major role to improve the quality of living by providing the population with various services (clean and accessible energy, transportation, urban planning, information exchange, and many others) improving human engagement in the ecosystem of Smart City services and processes. This research direction aims at understanding the processes and their contribution to value-creation related tasks in a Smart City, as well as the service interaction on the level of holistic software architecture supporting the whole Smart City.
Contact: Barbora Bühnová, Leonard Walletzký, Hind Bangui, Tomáš Pitner
Smart Buildings
Smart buildings are buildings that automate operation of installed technologies (e.g. Heating, ventilation, air conditioning -- HVAC) and provide remote monitoring and control of them. Smart building are typical applications of cyber-physical systems, in this case represented by building automation systems (BAS) and Building Management Systems (BMS). This project aims to provide methods for facility operation analysis based on data from mentioned cyber-physical systems. Within this project, a sematic model of building automation data is provided together with framework for querying the model and operation data retrieval. Additionally, focus is placed on security of smart buildings.
Contact: Adam Kučera, Tomáš Pitner
Cyber Security Analysis and Training
This long-term project aims at research and development of tools for economically-and-time efficient simulation of real Critical Information Infrastructures (CIIs), detecting of cyber-threats, and then mitigation. The created tools will provide support for automated preparation and execution of security teams’ training and exercises.
Created results will improve technical and professional cyber-security preparedness of Czech Republic in the terms of CII protection. In 2016, this project obtained a Ministry of Interior Award for the exceptional results in the field of security research.
Contact: Radek Ošlejšek, Karolína Burská, Daniel Tovarňák
Big Data Analysis
Big data analysis is becoming an integral part of many processes around us, to better support their understanding and decision making upon them, as well as to detect patterns that require further investigation. The main aim of this research direction within Lasaris is to identify and validate the effectiveness and limitations of existing data analysis techniques when being applied to different datasets under various setups (e.g. given by the research question being answered for the specific dataset). This research, supported by numerous benchmarks on realistic data samples, is meant to result into codified knowledge guiding the selection of the most effective technique for a specific problem setup.
Contact: Barbora Bühnová, Bruno Rossi, Tomáš Rebok, Mouzhi Ge, Jan Herman, Hind Bangui, Martin Macák
Software architecture optimization in PaaS Cloud Applications
Cloud computing is rapidly gaining momentum and is significantly influencing the entire IT industry, as a connecting element providing on demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources, that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Thanks to these attributes, cloud computing attracts growing attention within both industry and academia as an alternative model of software system operation, associated with high system availability, scalability and performance. However, the potential of cloud computing to optimize these quality characteristics is rarely taken to its fullest due to yet unclear dependencies of these qualities on proper software architecture design of the cloud-based systems. The aim of this project is the introduction of a set of architectural tactics with a clear measurable effect on the quality of the designed Platform-as-a-Service cloud application, which will be validated on a prototypical implementation.
Contact: David Gešvindr, Barbora Bühnová
IoT hardware and communication infrastructure
The rapid development and deployment of IoT system in past few years (SmartCities, SmartBuildings, Smart Home, Smart Anything or even Industry 4.0) is allowed by massive development and innovations of component base. MCUs are becoming smaller, more powerful and less power consuming; progress in antenna design leads to new wireless communication protocols; new materials gave the live to new sensors and actuators.
This research direction aims at understanding the technology progress, it's contribution to development of the IoT ecosystem, as well as evolving new areas of IoT applications opened by these new technology development.
Contact: Tomáš Pitner