Aerospace and transportation

Heads : Thomas CARLE and Rahim KACIMI

New challenges we focuse on are to design valided and verified smart and autonomous transport systems and to increase the reliable, performance and security of embedded, wireless and satellit communication networks which contribute to connect the world to the Internet of the future.

Scope

Until 2017, the two main research axes were on (1) certified development environment, and (2) communication and executive platforms. The challenge of these last years was to control the scale changes that are : (1) from equipment to system design, a new generation of IHM for cockpit and (2) from mono-processor to multicore processor, from embedded networks to heterogeneous networks interconnection, and also from development workshop to virtual development environment.

Since 2017, the research perimeter is structured around 3 axis : advanced communication networks, Aircraft and drone safety and security, earth observation. Moreover, researchers and enterprises have closely cooperated to specify new shared issues on artificial intelligence for transport (and data economics). This involves a large number of interdisciplinary researches included among others machine learning and Hybrid AI (in collaboration with the LabEx CIMI and the 3IA ANITI). Approximately 60 permanent members of IRIT are involved in this domain to which PhD and post-doctoral students and visiting researchers have to be added.

Scientific topics

The A&E area is concerned by all the big research subjects defined in the IRIT scientific politics and studied in the research departments more specifically :

  • « Towards reliable systems »: In the development of safety critical systems, certification plays a key role. Its purpose is to provide confidence that the system will behave in the best possible way for the safety and security of its users. It is usually enforced by public authorities based on international bodies of laws and regulations. Certification usually do not enforce any specific development process, method or tools, but will check that all risks have been well understood and managed both during the development and the operation of the system. IRIT (teams ACADIE, ADRIA, ARGOS, ICS, RMESS, SIERA, SMAC, SMART, TRACES) handles certification issues at two main levels : on the one hand modeling of the various artefacts involved during the development and operation of systems and on the other hand validation and verification activities based on these models, especially formal verification.
  • « Towards autonomous systems, adaptable to their environment », particularly for test and maintenance steps. New approaches are studied based on SMA and Situational Awareness.
  • « From Human cognition to interaction » where interactive embedded systems are designed, developed, validated and verified.
  • « From data to intelligent information » topic in which approaches are proposed to manage various avionics data such as those produced by flight tests, thoses about aircraft configuration, and communication network and end-system notifications/logs. It also includes the digital signal processing works.