Regional programme ICT-AsiaProject proposal

(research – innovation)

Project proposal application form

A. General presentation

A1 Project title

French-Asian cooperation on open adaptive middleware for ubiquitous environment

A2 Theme Research: Ubiquitous and mobilityInnovation: open source software

A3 Project objective

To bring together researchers to address scientific and technological challenges in the area of middleware induced by the dynamic nature of environment, the complexity of distributed systems

To exchange ideas, research results and technologies through mutual visits, workshops and seminarsTo set up a sustainable collaboration frameworkTo promote open source as a way to foster innovation

A4 Project summary

It is widely anticipated that future ubiquitous computing environments will be highly dynamic, subject to constant changes and of ever-increasing complexity. This in turn motivates the construction of dynamically configurable software infrastructures to provide a consistent, systematic basis for system evolution, control and management.

Targeted research is required into autonomic and complex adaptive approaches to distributed system design, along with non-intrusive middleware virtualization techniques. Such research will provide the essential foundations upon which distributed, adaptive, self-managing, self-healing systems, capable of transparently supporting the growing needs of

distributed e-business, e-gov, e-learning applications, will be built.

Because independent growth of ICT in France, China and Vietnam is a element key for the future of these nations and because Open Source represents an unique opportunity for these nations to take leadership on highly valuables technologies, partners wants to participate to this endeavour and rely on open source to turn research results into innovation that meet the needs of the industry.

Building upon existing open source initiatives such as ObjectWeb, Orientware and the Vietnamese Open Source Resource Center, the project will use open standards and the open source software development approach. It will benefit from an open community to enlarge and enforce its resources and input from researchers, scientists, professionals and users. Results will be released under open source license.

The project will be conducted by French, Chinese and Vietnamese partners having complementary skills and expertise.

Workshops will be conducted to exchange ideas, research results and technologies in the area of distributed systems, adaptable middleware and reflective component based models.The funding will also be used to initiate new joint projects based on this collaboration.

A5 Information on the project partnersAsian partner A : Asian partner B :

Organization National University of Defense Technology (representative of Orientware)

Organization Open source software resource center

Name of the lead researcher Prof JIA Yan

Name of the lead researcher

Nguyen Trung Quynh

Address Deya Street, Changsha, Hunan Address 39 Tran Hung Dao, Hanoi

410073, P. R. China VietnamTel/Fax Tel: +86 731 4573657

Fax: +86 731 4512504Tel/Fax Tel: (+ 84) (4) 9 439 322

Fax: (+ 84) (4) 9 439 736

Email aic603@public.cs.hn.cn quynhnt@most.gov.vn

Asian partner C : Asian partner D :

Organization Peking University (member of Orientware)

Organization

Name of the lead researcher

Dr. Gang HUANG Name of the lead researcher

Address School of EECSPeking UniversityBeijing, 100871, China

Address

Tel/Fax Tel : +86-10-62757670Fax : +86-10-62751792

Tel/Fax

Email huanggang@sei.pku.edu.cn Email

Asian partner E : France :

Organization Organization INRIA (Sardes, Jacquard, ObjectWeb)

Name of the lead researcher

Name of the lead researcher

Jean-Bernard Stefani

Address Address 655 avenue de l’Europe 38330 Montonnot

Tel/Fax Tel/Fax Tel: +33 4 76 61 52 57Fax: +33 4 76 61 52 52

Email Email Jean-Bernard.Stefani@inrialpes.fr

A6 Other associated partners

Asian partners France

B. Detailed project presentation

B1. General orientation of the project (basic research – applied research with or without the participation of a company)

The general orientation of the project is applied research.The project will use open source organizations as a pipeline to transfer research results to the industry.Partners are all involved in major open source initiatives in the participating countries.

B2. Project description

B2.1 Background

Cooperative Background

Introduction of ObjectWebFounded in 2002 by Bull, France Telecom and INRIA, ObjectWeb is a not-for-profit consortium of leading companies and research organizations from around the world which have joined forces to produce next generation of open source middleware in the form of flexible and adaptable components. Developments are based on recognized open standards, such as J2EE, CORBA, XML, GLOBUS, OSGi, to name a few. ObjectWeb also supports technology transfer to the industry to build innovative mission critical applications.

Introduction of OrientwareOrientware is an open organization that integrates the mature results achieved by the 863 Program in the domain of middleware by universities and institutes such as Beihang University, Peking University, the Institute of software for Chinese Science Academy and National University of Defense Technology etc. Orientware code base is a collaborative composition of various middleware platforms, such as CORBA, J2EE, TP-Monitor, Portal and Workflow built on open and standard technical specifications. The goal is to provide a comprehensive middleware platform for the Chinese national information infrastructure that could challenge its foreign counterparties with respect to performance and functionality.

Introduction of the Vietnamese Open Source Resource CenterThe OSS Resource Centre has been created to achieve the objectives of the Resolution No. 235/QD-TTg dated 02nd March, 2004 by Prime Minister related to the development of OSS in Vietnam. The overall goal is to promote the application and development of OSS in order to protect software copyright, to reduce the cost of buying softwares, and to promote the IT industry. It is a place to gather highly skilled experts from the whole country to do research, set up orientation, encourage students, popularize and support people with a view to diversify the availability of software options for Vietnamese.

ObjectWeb and Orientware signed a cooperation agreement in Shanghai on november 4

2005. The overall goal of this cooperation is to build together the next generation of open source adaptable middleware. In particular the main objectives of the cooperation are the following: * To extend and improve the architectural work undertaken in ObjectWeb and Orientware to develop a reflective component-based software architecture for distributed middleware. * To enhance and extend the existing code base in several dimensions: increased functional coverage, increased standards conformance, improved adaptability and quality of service properties. * To engineer common platforms from these flexible and scalable middleware components to provide support for different environments and mission critical applications.To achieve these objectives partners shall set up joint projects on topics of common interest such as component models, web services, workflow, transactions, J2EE, autonomous management, CCM and Grid computing. The partners will use open source for dissemination and transfer of the results of the cooperation to the industry. Common contributions will be released as open source under LGPL licence.

ObjectWeb and the Vietnamese OSS resource centre have been in contact for the organization in Hanoi of the COSGov conference on open source software for the e-government domain which was implemented in the scope of the European Asia IT&C program and supported by the Vietnamese ministry of science and technology.

Technological BackgroundUbiquitous computing advocates the construction of massively distributed systems that

help transform physical spaces into computationally active and intelligent environments. In a ubiquitous computing environment, software will run in a multitude of computing environments ranging from traditional desktops to multiple hosts, networked systems, to mobile systems, to embedded systems. Software systems will need to be ‘aware’ of their physical surroundings, taking input from real-world sensors and sending output intended to control the real-world environment. They will need to ‘understand’ their proximity to other computing resources and use this information to guide their behavior. Accordingly, the design of system and application need to take account of heterogeneous devices and rapidly changing contexts. To realize the environments, it is common nowadays to reduce the cost of developing ubiquitous computing applications through a middleware way, by encapsulating complex issues as middleware infrastructures that are shared by various applications.

In general, middleware is the supporting software between operation system layer and application layer. More exactly, it provides basic services and interagency for developing, deploying and running network application. After more than ten year’s development, middleware for enterprise computing have stood out in the middleware industry for its fast progress and comprehensive influence. The main goal of enterprise computing middleware is to mask heterogeneity, to support information exchange, to share and cooperate among the systems which are autonomous locally. Many middleware

technologies have emerged in the last decade, including Messaging Middleware, Transaction Processing Monitor, Integrate Middleware and Application Server. However, the novelty of ubiquitous computing environments impacts many challenges on the traditional middleware.

Scenario 1: Remote EducationAlice is a student who has a college education via Internet. One day, when she is interacting with her teacher and classmates, she receives an emergent call and has to go out by train. She needn’t break off his study procedure, like what we have to do today under such a circumstance. On the contrary, when she leaves his house, the interaction will be automatically transferred to her mobile phone, with some video and audio quality losses as a result of the bandwidth reduction. When she seats herself on the train, the video will switched seamlessly to the train’s LCD TV in front of her seat.

To realize this scenario, middleware should adapt itself to different devices and different QoS of the network as well as manage those resources without the intervention of users.

Scenario 2: Print AnywhereBill goes to another city to negotiate with a business partner. However, he suddenly finds that he has left a very important file behind when he arrives at the hotel. He doesn’t feel panic and just takes out his PDA, ordering it in voice to fetch the e-version file from his tablet PC in his office and print out it at once. After several minutes, a waitress knocks at his door and gives him the file needed.

To realize this scenario, middleware should be able to support the interoperation between various devices based on different hardware and software architecture, such as PDA, tablet PC and printer in this scenario. Another key challenge is that middleware should support autonomous service discovery to look for a printer in the nearby environment.

Scenario 3: Pervasive Software EvolutionIn a smart home environment, the media centre is designed to play various stream media such as IPTV programs. One day, it finds a new IPTV channel whose encoding format it can’t support. Instead of being turned off and upgraded manually by the user, the media centre autonomous searches the internet and upgrades itself online when a corresponding decoder has been found.

To realize this scenario, middleware should support the online evolvement and dynamic reconfiguration of up-level applications. A feasible way to realize this target is the component-oriented paradigm.

Considering the increasing variety of applications, the increasingly dynamic nature of target environments, and the resultant complexity of the systems involved, the current middleware technology is lacking adaptability and self-management capabilities: Adaptability concerns the ability to easily deploy, dynamically reconfigure, control

and manage distributed systems, while retaining efficiency and predictability in their execution.

Autonomous Management concerns the ability for a distributed system to control

and manage its resources, functions, security and performance, in the face of failures and changes, with little or no human intervention

Quality of Service concerns the ability for a distributed system to provide identified quality of service guarantees (e.g. response times, throughput, and tolerance to accidental faults) in their execution.

There are still a lot of open problems the research of ubiquitous middleware concerns. However, from the scenarios being mentioned earlier, we can conclude that there are some key requirements ubiquitous middleware should have at least, as shown in Fig 1: Adaptability Mechanism concerns the ability to easily deploy, dynamically reconfigure, control and manage distributed systems, while retaining efficiency and predictability in their execution.Autonomous resource management concerns the ability for a distributed system to autonomously control and manage its resources and performance.Interoperability concerns the ability to perform QoS-enabled communication over heterogeneous network architecture.Component-oriented paradigm concerns to apply component technology into applications and middleware itself.Service Discovery concerns the ability to discover and invoke services dynamically.

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Fig. 1 some key requirements of ubiquitous middleware

These constitute scientific and technological challenges that can only be met by bringing together researchers and developers covering a wide spectrum of expertise such as: component-based system design and construction, reflective distributed systems, distributed algorithms, distributed computing services, distributed programming models, real-time and dependable systems, etc.

B2.3 Objectives

The project has two main objectives: a collaboration objective and a scientific objective.

The collaboration objective of the project is to improve mutual understanding, and to foster the exchanges of ideas, technologies and researchers among the different teams of the project.

The scientific objective is to develop the software base - the middleware - for ubiquitous computing infrastructures addressing the scientific and technical challenges, which arise from the wide variety of applications and services that need to be supported.

Partners will first focus on extending and improving the architectural work undertaken at each partner level to develop a reflective component-based software architecture for distributed middleware and to engineer common platforms such as CCM based on flexible middleware components to provide support for different environments and mission critical applications.

B2.4 Challenges and ApproachesMiddleware must support a number of essential functions in ubiquitous computing environments, including communication mechanisms and a range of common services such as resource management, service discovery, service deployment, etc. Reinforcing the middleware by adaptability and self-management helps to meet the challenges in ubiquitous computing environments.

We identify three main challenges in the construction of middleware for ubiquitous computing environments, which the project intends to address: adaptability, quality of service under resource constraints, self-management. These are detailed in sections 2.41 to 2.43 below. To deal with these challenges, we rely on two main approaches: reflective software components and architecture-based control. These are detailed in sections 2.4.4 and 2.4.5.

B2.4.1 AdaptabilityFuture ubiquitous computing environments are expected to be highly dynamic in nature, a consequence of mobility, software updates and evolutions, changes in operating conditions (such as bandwidth, connectivity, etc), the constant introduction of new services, etc. To respond tothis dynamicity, it is crucial that middleware for ubiquitous environments support the necessary structures and mechanisms for automatic and online adaptation, e.g. to allow for online software changes, for distributed deployment, for planned and un-planned software evolution, for the implementation of adaptive resource management algorithms, for online specialization and optimization, for dynamic instrumentation and monitoring. The challenge of adaptability is to develop a middleware technology that is flexible and malleable enough to accommodate all these different needs while supporting a large variety of applications.

B2.4.2 Quality of service under resource constraints

In future ubiquitous computing environments, a large part of computing resources will be distributed in embedded and mobile devices, with large variations in hardware resource capacities, energy consumption and autonomy. Services deployed in these environments will also vary vastly in terms of quality of service requirements, from simple best-effort requirements to differentiated service levels that impose constraints e.g. on real-time response, guaranteed performance and availability. The challenge is therefore to develop middleware that can support differentiated services, with good isolation between applications, different forms of service level agreements, under different resource and energy constraints.

B2.4.3 Autonomous managementThe complexity of future ubiquitous computing environments will be such that it will be impossible for human administrators to perform their traditional functions of configuration management, performability management, and security management. Instead, one must resort to automate most of these management functions, allowing humans to concentrate on the definition and supervision of high-level management policies, while the middleware itself takes care of the translation of these high-level policies into automated control structures. The challenge is therefore to move from classical middleware support for configuration, performability and security management to support for self-configuration, self-tuning, self-healing and self-protecting capabilities.

B2.4.4 Reflective componentsTo deal with the challenge of adaptability, and as a prerequisite for supporting autonomous management strategies at different levels, our approach relies on the development and use of a reflective software component technology for the construction of ubiquitous computing middleware and applications. Briefly stated, a reflective component is a component that provides access to an explicit and causally connected representation of its own internal structure. When a system is constructed from reflective components, instrumenting it and reconfiguring it on line is vastly simplified, for it involves altering system components through their explicit representations. The basic challenges that must be overcome with this approach are a) to define a suitably generic and extensible component model, b) to develop efficient implementation techniques to overcome the overhead inherent in the execution of a reflective structure, and c) to provide effective programmatic support for the construction of reflective component-based structures.

B2.4.4 Architecture-based controlTo deal with the challenges of quality of service and autonomous management, our approach relies on reflective components and a general view of management functions as feedback loops that act on the explicit representations of software architecture maintained by components. The notion of feedback loop is directly inspired by the corresponding control-theoretic structures. The basic challenges that must be overcome with this approach are a) to provide effective support for the construction of software feedback loops, e.g. in the form of architectural patterns, their associated software frameworks and architecture description languages, b) to develop suitable control algorithms to automate management functions at different levels (from low-level local resource management to

higher-level distributed cluster and overlay management functions), and c) to develop automated or semi-automated support for the expression and the translation of high-level management policies.

B2.5 Implementation plan

The implementation plan details the different tasks to be performed by the project. They belong to two categories: support for collaboration, research and experimental development. The funding requested for the project will be used to fund the tasks in the category 'support for collaboration' (Tasks 1 and 2). The tasks in the category 'research and experimental development' (Tasks 3 to 5) correspond to the collaborative R&D program that the different partners have agreed to put in place and to develop during the course of the project.

Task 1 Exchange and visit program

To develop the collaboration among the different teams involved in the project, we will put in place a program of exchanges and visits. The visit program concerns the visits of researchers for short periods of time to foreign teams in the project. The purposes of these visits can vary (e.g. authoring a joint paper, giving a tutorial, giving code walkthroughs, etc). The exchange program will concern the visits of students and young researchers, for more extended periods of time than simple visits, for example to pursue a Master or a PhD thesis at a foreign team, to occupy a postdoctoral position at a foreign team, or to participate in joint projects. The funding requested for this Task covers essentially travels grants for these visits and exchanges.

Task 2 Workshops and joint events

To develop the collaboration among the different teams of the project, as well as initiate a dissemination of the results of the collaboration, we will put in place a program of joint events. These events can take several forms. We envisage at least four different kinds of events: a) closed workshops, open only to participating teams, and dedicated to the study of selected scientific themes; b) open workshops, which can function on invitation only or with a program committee; c) community workshops, open to the open source community at large through ObjectWeb, Orientware and the Vietnamese Open Source Resource Centre, but organized by participating teams on themes which are of direct relevance to the different themes of the projects (Tasks 3 to 5); d) joint distributed demonstrations of prototypes developed as part of the collaboration. The funding requested for this Task covers essentially travel grants and contributions to the organization of these joint events.

Task 3 Reflective component technology

The objective of this Task is the development of a reflective component technology (component model + supporting tools) suitable to the development of highly configurable and highly adaptable middleware and ubiquitous computing systems. In order to be

adaptable to embedded systems, this technology should be:• Lightweight. Reflective components should be readily implementable in resource-

constrained embedded systems. The supporting technology should also allow different forms of optimizations and dynamic adaptations to be selected, in order to account for the different trade-offs that can take place in embedded system design.

• Instrumented. The component model should be equipped with appropriate linguistic support in the form of an architecture description language (ADL) and its verification and compilation tools. The ADL should provide an extensible support for the expression of different architectural concerns (e.g. component dependencies, quality of service contracts, energy constraints), and be used as a common entry point for different supporting tools (e.g. model and type checking tools for offline verification, optimizing compiler for actual code generation, installer for distributed deployment).

The different research themes to be studied under this task comprise:• Model. This concerns the definition and formal semantics of a reflective

component model well suited to the needs of highly dynamic, resource constrained ubiquitous environments. Of particular interest in this context is the handling of different forms of aspects, especially non-functional ones related to QoS or energy issues.

• Dynamic ADL. This concerns the definition of an extensible architecture description language, allowing both the support of non-functional aspects, and the support of behavioral component descriptions.

• ADL Tools. This concerns the development of support tools for the project ADL, including a retargettable compiler, various type checkers and verifiers to assist in the design and analysis of component-based systems.

The background and initial contributions for this Task, from the different teams in the project, are as follows:- INRIA (Sardes + Jacquard): Fractal model and its formal semantics, Fractal implementations (Julia, AOKell, Think), Fractal tools (extensible ADL compiler, Explorer).- NUDT: visual model&tools for CCM composition, packaging and deployment- PKU (PKUAS): RSA (Architecture based Reflection), ABC/ADL and ABCTool (extensible and dynamic ADL, compiler and visual modelling tool); PKUAS reflective framework (a reflective J2EE application server).- VOSSRC: work on Fractal implementation and Fractal tools such as model checkers and verifiers

Task 4 Real-time embedded infrastructure

The objective of this Task is to develop a reflective self-adaptive infrastructure for resource-constrained systems. This infrastructure can be configured statically or dynamically, to satisfy the requirements of high predictability and low footprint in ubiquitous computing environments.

There are some foreseeable challenges in the research and development:• Kernel design. We have to trade off between the flexibility and the complexity,

including how to define a minimum core of the infrastructure and how to design a highly efficient component loading and unloading mechanisms.

• Adaptive resource management. The management (e.g. reservation, allocation, de-allocation) of resources in a resource-limited, time-constrained, and energy-constrained environment, is a crucial issue which needs to be addressed with adaptive strategies to deal with the dynamicity of ubiquitous environments.

• Temporal isolation. The issue here is how to ensure a temporal isolation between multiple mutual dependent applications, which may be have different timeliness constraints such as hard real-time, soft real-time and sporadic, but require access to some common resource (e.g. processor, memory or communication). Isolation is crucial both for quality of service and security (e.g. response to denial of service attacks).

The background and initial contributions for this Task, from the different teams in the project, are as follows:- INRIA (Sardes + Jacquard): Fractal/Think ADL tool chain and operating system kernel library.- NUDT: CORBA Component Model implementation (StarCCM), minimum ORB implementation (eBus), and real-time ORB implementation (StarORB-rt)- VOSSRC: work on temporal isolation

Task 5 Autonomous management

The objective of this Task is to develop an architecture for the autonomous management of distributed systems, and to apply it to the construction of autonomic capabilities of large distributed systems. We will consider initially two application domains for experimenting and validating the autonomic capabilities developed as part of the project: large J2EE systems (cluster-based and overlay-based J2EE application servers), and networks of resource-constrained mobile devices.

This task will study the following autonomic capabilities (noting that all these capabilities face issues of scalability for dealing with large distributed systems):

• Self-configuration. This concerns the automated deployment and reconfiguration of complex distributed systems, taking into potential failures, consistency issues, and configuration workflow issues.

• Self-healing. This concerns the automated detection and recovery from hardware and software faults in complex distributed systems, taking into account causality and diagnosis issues, automated recovery planning, compositionality issues with the coexistence of multiple fault-tolerance and fault recovery mechanisms.

• Self-tuning. This concerns the automated adaptation and optimization of resources to a given external load (requests, jobs) in large distributed systems, taking into account detection and characterization of system load, multi-level resource accounting, system performance modelling issues, adaptive admission

and scheduling strategies.• Self-protection. This concerns the automated response to malicious faults and

attacks on a large distributed system, taking into account issues of attack detection, application isolation, automated response planning.

The background and initial contributions for this Task, from the different teams in the project, are as follows:- INRIA (Sardes + Jacquard): Fractal ADL, Jade autonomous management framework, Fractal deployment framework.- NUDT: dynamic configuration model and implementation (StarCCM), and performance oriented dynamic reconfiguration model, component-based fault diagnosis.- PKU (PKUAS): PKUAS Self-Adaptive Framework (nearly 10 cases have been studied), ABC/ADL and ABCTool for modelling self-adaptive software architectures, Autonomous Component (adding rule based reasoning capability into reflective component model).- VOSSRC: validation of the automatic capabilities of the framework

Project reachThe impact of the project lies into the key role of distributed middleware for France and Asia economy and the competitiveness reinforcement that can be achieved with open-source alternatives. Middleware, i.e. the layer of software services that addresses the generic communication and interoperability needs of distributed applications and simplifies their construction, has become a central element in the development of networked services, such as e-commerce and e-government. Middleware is also a key software infrastructure for a number of multi-segment industries such as the telecommunications industry and the command and control (e.g. transport, automotive, and aerospace) industries that are facing the problem of building complex, long-lived, mission-critical, large-scale distributed applications. There, middleware plays an important role in insulating applications from a constantly changing infrastructure, and it facilitates the maintenance and evolution, of these applications, in the face of changing environments as well as evolving operational requirements.Distributed middleware is now accepted as a central and critical element in modern distributed system design, as witnessed by such de facto standards as OMG CORBA, Sun Java (including J2EE, J2SE and J2ME), and Microsoft .Net. Open source is now well-accepted as a viable alternative for the development and distribution of robust system-level software, as witnessed by the success of the GNU/Linux operating system and of the Apache Web server. While there are several open source efforts (JBoss, Eclipse, etc) none of them currently targets highly adaptable distributed middleware made from a set of middleware components tackling technical challenges such as malleability, quality of services and scalability.The construction of dynamically configurable software infrastructures should provide a consistent, systematic basis for system evolution, control and management in order to address scenarios as described in section B2.1.

Expected outcomes

The project is expected to:- establish a long-lasting R&D cooperation between France and Asia in the field of open source middleware.

- contribute to popularize open source as a way to foster innovation.

- support the development of an efficient reflective software component technology for the construction of dynamically configurable and adaptable middleware by extending and improving the architectural work undertaken by partners.

- develop common middleware components to provide support for real-time embedded environments and mission critical applications.

The outcomes of the cooperation will be presented through open workshops and demonstrations. Common contributions will be released as open source and promoted through ObjectWeb, Orientware and the Vietnamese Open Source Software Resource Centre.

B3. Timeline and main implementation phases All the Tasks (T1 to T5) will run in parallel for the duration of the project (2 years). The main milestones of the project are as follows:

• T0 => T0+6: initial visits, first internal workshop in Asia to finalize research workprogramme and establish key research directions, planning initial student and young researcher exchanges.

• T0+6 => T0+12: first student and young researchers exchanges, first open/community workshop in France.

• T0+12 => T0+18: first joint demonstration, second closed workshop in France.

• T0+18 => T0+24: second joint demonstration, second open/community workshop in Asia.

B4. Contributions

INRIA will work with PKU and VOSSRC on component model and ADL to extend Fractal with ABC and PKUAS features, improve functional cov-erage with capabilities such as autonomic behaviour and to define val-idation methods for model checking. NUDT will work with INRIA and VOSSRC on designing a reflective component based lightweight CCM infrastructure.PKU, NUDT, VOSSRC and INRIA will jointly work to develop a software architecture for the autonomous management of distributed systems, and to apply it to J2EE systems and mobile devices domain.

Role of INRIA INRIA (Jacquard and Sardes) will contribute to task 3, 4 and 5 with their work on the Fractal component model, the Jade framework for au-tonomous distributed systems management and the OpenCCM implementation of the CORBA Component Model. Those projects are all available as open source under the ObjectWeb umbrella. INRIA will participate to the visit and exchange program and will organize some workshops in France. ObjectWeb will contribute to the or-ganization of events, dissemination of project results and will provide a collaborative infrastructure (website, wiki, mailing lists, forge, etc) to support the cooperation.INRIA is deeply involved in the Open Source and it is one the key founder of ObjectWeb. In order to expand its presence and role at a more international level INRIA has clearly chosen the way of open con-sortium as a vehicle that foster innovation, allows to listen directly users’ needs, has mutual contributions and ensure the standards sta-bility shared between international key players from different domains (Universities, Public research, large companies, SMEs …) or expertise areas.

Role of NUDTNUDT will contribute to task 3, 4 and 5 with their work on the light-weight CCM component model for autonomous distributed systems management and the StarCCM implementation of the CORBA Component Model. StarCCM are all available as open source under the ObjectWeb umbrella. NUDT will participate to the visit and exchange program and will organize some workshops in China.NUDT is also involved in the Open Source and it is one the key founder of Orientware providing key roles such as the Head of the Orientware technical committee. In order to promote the activity and role at a more international level, NUDT has actively participated in the Object-Web and Orientware collaboration, and the related international re-search activities.

Role of PKUPKU will contribute to task 3 and 5 with their work on the PKUAS implementation of the J2EE with plentiful innovative features, including reflective middleware, architecture based reflection, self-adaptive software architecture and so on. This project is available as open source under the Orientware umbrella. PKU will participate to the visit and exchange program and the organization of some workshops in China.

Role of VOSSRCVOSSRC will contribute to task 1 and 2 by sending researchers overseas to operate and study tutorials and code walkthroughs and by cooperating with other partners to organize workshops. VOSSRC will also contribute to task 3, 4 and 5 and assist INRIA and other partners in studying, implementing, testing and validating the component model and automous framework. VOSSRC will also provide requirements for distributed

applications in Vietnam and adapt the software architecture to Vietnam needs.

B5. Organization & Credentials INRIA INRIA is the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. It is a scientific and technological institute operating under the dual authority of the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Industry. INRIA has maintained for many years a solid reputation in basic and applied research in the fields of computer science and control. Along with its international experience, INRIA is closely involved in the transfer of technology, either through partnership with industrial companies, or through its high-tech companies. The INRIA team participating to the project belongs to the ObjectWeb Consortium, the Sardes Project and the Jacquard Project. INRIA is one of the founding partners of ObjectWeb and is hosting the ObjectWeb Consortium. The Sardes research team is an deals with the design and construction of large-scale reflective distributed systems, including the formalisation of reflective distributed computational and programming models for such systems. The Jacquard research team deals with the large problem of design and support of complex distributed applications made of numerous cooperating software components, distributed on various sites, under various constraints like persistence, security, fault tolerance, etc. INRIA will be in charge of the overall coordination of the project.

Lead researcher: Jean-Bernard StefaniJean-Bernard Stefani is the scientific leader of the SARDES project at INRIA Rhône-Alpes research unit and a member of ObjectWeb board of directors. His research interests include reflective component technology and autonomous distributed systems management.Philippe Merle is a research scientist of the Jacquard project at INRIA Futurs and a member of ObjectWeb college of architects. His research interests include component-oriented platforms and new methodological and technical approaches to design and exploit complex distributed applications.For ObjectWeb the contact person is Julie Marguerite who is in charge of cooperation with Asia for the consortium.

Peking University (PKU) Peking University is a comprehensive and National key university. At present, Peking university has 216 research institutes and research centres, and there are 2 national engineering research centres, 81 key national disciplines, 12 national key laboratories. Peking University has become a center for teaching and research and a university of the new type, consisting of diverse branches of learning such as pure and applied sciences, social sciences and the humanities, and sciences of management and education. Its aim is to rank among the world's best universities at the beginning of the next century. PKU is a member of the Chinese open source consortium Orientware.

Lead researcher: Dr. Huang GangDr. Huang is an associate professor in the School of Electronics Engineering and

Computer Science in Peking University. His research interests include distributed computing with emphasis on middleware and software engineering with emphasis on component and software architecture. Related Research Experience: ”Domain Oriented Component Operating Platform” funded by “863” high-tech research and development program” Research on Theory and Methodology of Agent-based Middleware on Internet Platform” funded by “973” National Basic Research Program.Related Publications:More than 40 published papers on international journals and important conferences. “Runtime Recovery and Manipulation of Software Architecture of Component-based Systems”. International Journal of Automated Software Engineering, Springer, to appear in Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 257-281, 2006. “Towards a Unified Formal Model for Supporting Mechanisms of Dynamic Component Update”, The fifth joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC-FSE'05), Lisbon, Portugal, September 5-9, 2005, pp. 80-89. “Towards Autonomic Computing Middleware via Reflection”. In Proceedings of 28th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), Hongkong, September 28-30, 2004, pp.122-127. “PKUAS: An Architecture-based Reflective Component Operating Platform”, invited paper, 10th IEEE International Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems (FTDCS), 26-28 May 2004, pp 163-169.

National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) The National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) is a university directly under the supervision of the Central Military Committee of the Peoples’ Republic of China. With special support from the Central Government, NUDT undertakes the significant roles of fostering advanced scientific and technological personnel, conducting research on key defense technologies and training high-ranking officers for all the branches of the military. At present, the university is actively carrying out the government’s policy of rejuvenating the nation through science and education and building a strong military through science and technology. Great efforts are being made to build the NUDT into a world-class university with Chinese military characteristics.NUDT is a key member of the Chinese open source consortium Orientware.

Lead researcher: Prof. JIA, YanProf. Jia is Associate Director of Research Department of networked information security and Group leader of the integrated middleware of software and hardware computer technologies project supported by “863” high-tech research and development program.Research Experience: ”New generation of middleware core technologies and runtime platform in networked environments” funded by “863” high-tech research and development program ”New generation of networked middleware architecture?protocols and

implementations” funded by National Science Foundation of China.Honors and Awards: The Second Award of National Science and Technology Progress The First Award of Ministries&Commissions Science and Technology Progress The Second Award of Ministries&Commissions Science and Technology ProgressRelated Publications:More than one hundred published papers on international journals and important conferences.

Vietnamese Open Source Software Resource Center (VOSSRC)The OSS Resource Centre has been created to achieve the objectives of the Resolution No. 235/QD-TTg dated 02nd March, 2004 by Prime Minister related to the development of OSS in Vietnam. The overall goal is to promote the application and development of OSS in order to protect software copyright, to reduce the cost of buying softwares, and to promote the IT industry. It is a place to gather highly skilled experts from the whole country to do research, set up orientation, encourage students, popularize and support people with a view to diversify the availability of software options for Vietnamese.

Lead researcher: Mr. Nguyen Trung QuynhMr. Nguyen Trung Quynh is the Director of the Vietnam Open Source Software Resource Center and the Deputy General Director of the IT office of the Ministry of Science and Technology.     Mr. Nguyen Trung Quynh was a member of the task force to develop IT policies in Vietnam such as:      - Resolution No 49/CP of Vietnam government on IT development in Vietnam by the year 2000      - Resolution No 07/2000/NQ-CP of Vietnam Government on Establishment and Development of IT           Software Industry for the period 2000-2005, 2000      - Decision No 128/2000/QD-TTg of the Prime Minister on Policies and Measures to encourage investment and development of the Software Industry, 2000 - Directive No 58-CT/TW of Politburo on Acceleration of IT application and development in the period of Industrialization and modernization, 2000 - Decision No 81/2001/QD-TTg  of the Prime Minister on National IT action plan, Master plan on IT period 2001-1005 He is also the leader  of the numbers of  policy researching projects, stated as followings:

     -  The impact of Technology to e-commerce 2001      -  B2B e-commerce to to support export market of Vietnam, funded by Austria, 2002      -  Member of the edit board of Digital Review of Asia Pacific (www.digital-review.org <http://www.digital-review.org/>), 2002 to present,  UNDP, IDRC Canada and ORBICOM.

C. Budget proposal

Income Expenditure1ère année Asian partners: 0 Mobility

- travel grants for visits, exchanges 5x1.2 k€ = 6 k€

Equipement : 0

Operational cost:

Scholarships: 0

International seminars:- 2 workshopsLogistics: 2x5k€=10k€Mobility: 10x1.2 k€ = 12 k€

Other (expand): 0

French partners: 0

-MAE : 28 k€

2ème année Asian partners: 0 Mobility - travel grants for visits, exchanges : 5x1.2 k€ = 6 k€-Equipement : 0

Operational cost:

Scholarships: 0

International seminars:- 2 workshops: Logistics: 2x5k€=10k€Mobility: 10x1.2 k€ = 12 k€

Other (expand): 0

French partners: 0

-MAE : 28k€

Total 56 k€

Financial support request to the French Ministry of foreign affairs (MAE):

1st year Mobility 6k€-researchers:-doctoral students:-post-docs:International seminars: -logistics: 10k€-mobility: 12k€

2nd year Mobility 6k€-researchers:-doctoral students:-post-docs:International seminars: -logistics : 10k€-mobility : 12k€

Total 56 k€