Mauro Marinoni

• Ph.D.
• Researcher at Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies

The heavy use of machine learning algorithms in safety-critical systems poses serious questions related to safety, security, and predictability issues, requiring novel architectural approaches to guarantee such properties. This paper presents an architecture solution that leverages heterogeneous platforms and virtualization technologies to support...

The railway industry is searching for new ways to automate a number of complex train functions, such as object detection, track discrimination, and accurate train positioning, which require the artificial perception of the railway environment through different types of sensors, including cameras, LiDARs, wheel encoders, and inertial measurement uni...

The effectiveness of current railway signaling systems heavily depends on the accuracy in the localization of trains on the track, which is currently enforced using static markers mounted along the line, called balises. However, balises are expensive, sparse, prone to tampering, and subject to maintenance, hence they need to be integrated by additi...

The railway industry is investigating new ways to improve the safety and the performance of signalling functions (e.g., train localization) and automate other complex train functions, such as signal and sign recognition, obstacle detection, and track discrimination. Such tasks require the artificial perception of the railway environment through the...

Modern FPGA System-on-Chips (SoCs) embed large FPGA logics capable of hosting multiple hardware accelerators. Typically, hardware accelerators require direct access to the shared DRAM memory for reaching the high performance demanded by modern applications. In commercial FPGA SoCs, this goal is achieved by interconnecting the hardware accelerators...

Computing platforms for next-generation cyber–physical systems are evolving towards heterogeneous architectures comprising different processing elements and hardware accelerators. In particular, SoC-FPGA platforms, including multiple general-purpose processing cores tightly coupled with an FPGA fabric, represent an attractive solution due to their...

In this paper, the problem of temporal isolation among containerized software components running in shared cloud infrastructures is tackled, proposing an approach based on hierarchical real-time CPU scheduling. This allows for reserving a precise share of the available computing power for each container deployed in a multi-core server, so to provid...

Since its dawn as a discipline, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has focused on mimicking the human mental processes. As AI applications matured, the interest for employing them into real-world complex systems (i.e., coupling AI with Cyber-Physical Systems—CPS) kept increasing. In the last decades, the multi-agent systems (MAS) paradigm has been among...

This paper presents Big-LITTLE Constant Bandwidth Server (BL-CBS), a dynamic partitioning approach to schedule real-time task sets in an energy-efficient way on multi-core platforms based on the ARM big.LITTLE architecture. BL-CBS is designed as an on-line and adaptive scheduler, based on a push/pull architecture that is suitable to be incorporated...

ARM big.LITTLE architectures are spreading more and more in the mobile world thanks to their power-saving capabilities due to the use of two ISA-compatible islands, one focusing on energy efficiency and the other one on computational power. This architecture makes the problem of energy-aware task scheduling particularly challenging, due to the numb...

0000−0001−5118−2084] , Paolo Giorgini 1[0000−0003−4152−9683] , Mauro Marinoni 2[0000−0002−7041−9777] , and Davide Calvaresi 3[0000−0001−9816−7439] Abstract. Currently, distributed cyber-physical systems (CPS) rely upon embedded real-time systems, which can guarantee compliance with time constraints. CPS are increasingly required to act and interact...

Currently, distributed cyber-physical systems (CPS) rely upon embedded real-time systems, which can guarantee compliance with time constraints. CPS are increasingly required to act and interact with one another in dynamic environments. In the last decades, the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture has proven to be ideal for developing agents w...

Validating the behavior of a complex system is a fundamental step in the development process to avoid costly damages and dangerous circumstances. Such a phase requires a realistic simulation of the system and the reproduction of the full operative scenario, including the environment with all the possible events and situations in which the system co...

AMBA AXI is a popular bus protocol that is widely adopted as the medium to exchange data in field-programmable gate array system-on-chips (FPGA SoCs). The AXI protocol does not specify how conflicting transactions are arbitrated and hence the design of bus arbiters is left to the vendors that adopt AXI. Typically, a round-robin arbitration is imple...

Providing innovative resource-efficient solutions able to mitigate temporal interference among cloud services, concurrently sharing the same underlying platform, is crucial to deploy highly time-sensitive applications at the edge of the network where resources are strongly restrained, and timing constraints are stringent. A notable example is provi...

This paper elaborates on the importance of having efficient inter-container communications at the edge of the network in Software Defined Network-Network Function Virtualization (SDN-NFV) architectures, when deploying services close to the end-user, due to the broad range of bandwidth and latency requirements as coming from novel scenarios in the 5...

Telerehabilitation in older adults is most needed in the patient environments, rather than in formal ambulatories or hospitals. Supporting such practices brings significant advantages to patients, their family, formal and informal caregivers, clinicians, and researchers. This paper presents a focus group with experts in physiotherapy and telerehabi...

In the last decades, the use of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) resulted in being the most relevant approach to foster the development of systems performing distributed reasoning, automated/autonomous actions, and regulating component interactions in unpredictable and uncertain scenarios. The scientific community provided numerous innovative contribution...

The adoption of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is permeating Inter-net of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Timing reliability of MAS is a daring challenge. The study of local task execution and negotiation of workloads are catalyzing considerable interest. By adopting techniques typical of Real-Times Systems (RTS), MAS's ability to comply...

This paper presents preliminary results from our ongoing research for ensuring stable performance of co-located distributed cloud services in a resource-efficient way. It is based on using a real-time CPU scheduling policy to achieve a fine-grain control of the temporal interferences among real-time services running in co-located containers. We pre...

Upcoming 5G mobile networks strongly rely on Software-Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualiza-tion that allow exploiting the flexibility in resource allocation provided by the underlying virtualized infrastructures. These paradigms often employ platform abstractions designed for cloud applications which have not to deal with the stringen...

This paper highlights ineffifiencies in modern cloud infrastructures due to a distance between the research on high-level cloud management / orchestration and the research on low-level kernel and hypervisor mechanisms. Our position about this issue is that more research is needed to make these two worlds talk to each other, providing richer abstrac...

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) require a multitude of components interacting among themselves and with the users to perform automatic actions, usually under unpredictable or uncertain conditions. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have emerged over the years as one of the major technological paradigms regulating interactions and negotiations among autonomous...

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been supporting the development of distributed systems performing decentralized thinking and reasoning, automated actions, and regulating component interactions in unpredictable and uncertain scenarios. Despite the scientific literature is plenty of innovative contributions about resource and tasks allocation, the age...

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been supporting the development of distributed systems performing decentralized thinking and reasoning, automated actions, and regulating component interactions in unpredictable and uncertain scenarios. Despite the scientific literature is plenty of innovative contributions about resource and tasks allocation, the age...

The adoption of motor-rehabilitative therapies is highly demanded in a society where the average age of the population is constantly increasing. A recent trend to contain costs while providing high quality of healthcare services is to foster the adoption of self-care procedures, performed primarily in patients’ environments rather than in hospitals...

Techniques originating from the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) areas have extensively been applied to develop intelligent and pervasive systems such as assistive monitoring, feedback in telerehabilitation, energy management, and negotiation. Those application domains particularly include three major characteristics: intel...

Telerehabilitation in older adults is most needed in the patient environments, rather than in formal ambulatories or hospitals. Supporting such practices brings significant advantages to patients, their family, formal and informal caregivers, clinicians, and researchers. Several techniques and technologies have been developed aiming at facilitating...

Radio access networks for future LTE/5G scenarios need to be designed so as to satisfy increasingly stringent requirements in terms of overall capacity, individual user performance, flexibility and power efficiency. This is triggering a major shift in the Telcom industry from statically sized, physically provisioned network appliances towards the u...

Operation of wireless sensor nodes or battery powered embedded systems in cold and harsh environments requires careful battery selection and management. In this paper we first provide a general model of an energy harvesting sensor system and the respective energy flows. We then present a Maximum Power Point Tracking solar harvesting system accordin...

Ambient assisted living (AAL) is focused on providing assistance to people primarily in their natural environment. Over the past decade, the AAL domain has evolved at a fast pace in various directions. The stakeholders of AAL are not only limited to patients, but also include their relatives, social services, health workers, and care agencies. In f...

Modern distributed embedded systems frequently involve wireless communication nodes where messages have to be delivered within given timing constraints. This goal can be achieved by adopting a suitable real-time communication protocol. In addition, connecting such systems with mobile devices is also desirable for performing configuration, monitorin...

Heterogeneous platforms equipped with processors and field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) can be exploited to accelerate specific functions triggered by software activities. Thanks to dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) capabilities of modern FPGAs, such functions can be programmed at run-time, thus opening a new dimension in the resource manage...

Robots interacting with human beings are widespread in modern environments, and those performing intelligent tasks without human supervision need to take into account potential criticalities. Making robots compete enable their evaluation with respect to navigation, mapping, object recognition, tracking and manipulation capabilities. Robot competiti...

This paper presents an extension to the Arduino framework that introduces multitasking support and allows running multiple concurrent tasks in addition to the single execution cycle provided by the standard Arduino framework. The extension has been implemented through the ERIKA Enterprise open-source real-time kernel, while maintaining the simplici...

In embedded systems operated by battery and interacting with the environment, a fundamental issue is the enforcement of real-time and energy constraints to guarantee a desired lifetime with a given performance. A lot of research has focused on energy management at the communication level; however, not many authors considered both real-time and ener...

This article presents a survey of energy-aware scheduling algorithms proposed for real-time systems. The analysis presents the main results starting from the middle 1990s until today, showing how the proposed solutions evolved to address the evolution of the platform's features and needs. The survey first presents a taxonomy to classify the existin...

Nowadays, the real-time domain cannot neglect modern hardware architectures and the programming paradigms developed to fully exploit their capabilities. This has shown the limitations of classical task models, like the periodic one proposed by Liu&Layland, and it is pushing for the adoption of more realistic task models and the development of new s...

New programming models have been proposed to exploit the parallelism of modern computing architectures. Also in the real-time domain more detailed task models are under evaluation to provide a tighter analysis of parallel application with precedence and timing constraints. This paper presents two schedulability tests based on Response Time Analysis...

A significant number of real-time control applications include computational activities where the results have to be delivered at precise instants, rather than within a deadline. The performance of such systems significantly degrades if outputs are generated before or after the desired target time. This work presents a general methodology that can...

Monitoring teams of mobile nodes is becoming crucial in a growing number of activities. Where it is not possible to use fixed references or external measurements, one of the possible solutions involves deriving relative positions from local communication. Well-known techniques such as trilateration and multilateration exist to locate a single node...

Low energy consumption is one of the primary issues that have to be addressed in body area networks to prevent frequent battery recharges in the nodes. Such networks are being increasingly used to acquire sensory data that need to be processed in real-time. The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol is an attractive solution for implementing personal...

Current patient follow-up practices held by General Prac- titioners (GPs) are often unstructured. Due to the high number of pa- tients and time limitations, data collection and trend analysis is often performed only for a small number of critical patients. An increasing demand is coming from the physician community for having a set of supporting to...

The lack of success of tele-monitoring systems in non-clinical environments is mainly due to the difficulty experienced by common users to deal with them. In particular, for achieving a correct operation, the user is required to take care of a number of annoying details, such as wearing them correctly, putting them in operation, using them in a pro...

Current patient follow-up practices held by General Practitioners (GPs) are often unstructured. Due to the high number of patients and time limitations, data collection and trend analysis is often performed only for a small number of critical patients. An increasing demand is coming from the physician community for having a set of supporting tools...

The lack of success of tele-monitoring systems in non-clinical environments is mainly due to the difficulty experienced by common users to deal with them. In particular, for achieving a correct operation, the user is required to take care of a number of annoying details, such as wearing them correctly, putting them in operation, using them in a pro...

Wearable devices are driving the development of post-surgery rehabilitation procedures, also helping in reducing the recovery time and social costs. This paper presents a real-time monitoring framework aimed at supporting telerehabilitation sessions for lower-limbs functional recovery. The presented framework supports patients during the execution...

Engine control applications require the execution of tasks activated in relation to specific system variables, such as the crankshaft rotation angle. To prevent possible overload conditions at high rotation speeds, such tasks are designed to vary their functionality (hence their computational requirements) for different speed ranges. Modeling and a...

Tracking the position and the orientation of human limbs to reconstruct postures and actions is becoming a crucial need in several application domains, including medicine, rehabilitation, sport, and games. However, most available solutions are expensive, imprecise, or require an instrumentation of the environment. This paper presents a low-cost tra...

Monitoring teams of mobile nodes is becoming crucial in a growing number of activities. When it is not possible to use fix references or external measurements, a practicable solution is to derive relative positions from local communication. In this work, we propose an anchor-free Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) method aimed at small multi...

Poor adherence to drug therapies still represents an unsolved problem. In order to provide a useful solution to chronic patients of all ages - with particular attention to the elderly - who are subjected to complex therapeutic regimen, an innovative ICT solution, called Dr.Drin, has been designed and tested . The aim of the developed framework is t...

This paper presents a new energy-aware algorithm that integrates Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and Dynamic Power Management (DPM) techniques to further reduce energy consumption in embedded systems. It consists of an off-line DVFS-stage, for computing the speed that minimizes energy consumption during active intervals while guarantee...

The energy consumption in distributed systems depends on several inter-related factors, including task partitioning, process redundancy, fault tolerance, task and message scheduling, and communication bandwidth allocation. Although some of these issues have been considered in the literature in isolation, a systematic approach considering all the co...

Several real-time applications include tasks in which the output must be produced at precise time instants, rather than “within” a deadline, and the overall system performance significantly degrades when the task is executed too late or too early with respect to the desired time. This paper illustrates one of such applications and takes it as a ref...

In battery operated embedded systems, an efficient energy management is a key feature for increasing the system lifetime, as well as for controlling the application performance. In this paper, we present a power management module designed for tiny embedded operating systems and implemented in the Erika Enterprise, an OSEK-compliant kernel. The obta...

A crucial objective in battery operated embedded systems is to work under the minimal power consumption that provides a desired level of performance. Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and Dynamic Power Management (DPM) are typical techniques used on processors and devices to reduce the power consumption through speed variations and power...

A central issue for verifying the schedulability of hard real-time systems is the correct evaluation of task execution times. These values are significantly influenced by the preemption overhead, which mainly includes the cache related delays and the context switch times introduced by each preemption. Since such an overhead significantly depends on...

Next-generation real-time systems will be increasingly based on heterogeneous MPSoC design paradigms, where predictability and performance will be key issues to deal with. Such issues can be tackled both at the hardware level, by embedding technologies such as TDMA busses, and at the OS level, where suitable scheduling techniques can improve perfor...

A crucial objective in battery operated embedded systems is to work under the minimal power consumption that provides a desired level of performance. Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) and Dynamic. Power Management (DPM) are typical techniques used on processors and devices to reduce the power consumption through speed variations and power switching, re...

Limited preemption scheduling has been introduced as a viable alternative to non-preemptive and fully preemptive scheduling when reduced blocking times need to coexist with an acceptable context switch overhead. To achieve this goal, preemptions are allowed only at selected points of the code of each task, decreasing the preemption overhead and sim...

In distributed embedded systems operated by battery, energy management is a critical issue that has to be addressed at different architecture levels. For systems that tightly interact with the environment, an additional goal is to enforce a set of real-time constraints to guarantee a desired performance. A lot of research has focused on power manag...

Recently, researchers and engineers began considering the use of WSN in time-sensitive applications. For effective real-time communications, it is important to solve the problem of contention to the communication medium providing an efficient bandwidth allocation mechanism. In this paper we tackle with the problem of performing timely detection of...

In industrial contexts it might be useful to deploy Wireless Sensor Networks to constantly monitor the status of a plant. At early design stage of any monitoring application, it is envisaged to reinforce real-time paradigms both for task execution and node- to-node communication. Model driven applications are usually seamless provided the system de...

Applying classical dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) techniques to real-time systems running on processors with discrete voltage/frequency modes causes a waste of computational resources. In fact, whenever the ideal speed level computed by the DVS algorithm is not available in the system, to guarantee the feasibility of the task set, the processor spee...

Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAV) represent an attractive solution for those monitoring applications in hazardous environments, where direct human intervention is difficult or impossible to achieve. Small autonomous aircrafts represents a convenient possibility for monitoring large areas, for example for detecting fires and following their evoluti...

Applying classical dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) techniques to real-time systems running on processors with discrete voltage/frequency modes causes a waste of computational resources. In fact, whenever the ideal speed level computed by the DVS algorithm is not avail- able in the system, to guarantee the feasibility of the task set, the processor sp...

Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is a technique used in modern microprocessors operated by battery to set voltage and frequency levels at proper values that meet performance requirements while minimizing energy consumption. Most of the present work on DVS management, however, is based on simplistic assumptions about the hardware characteristics that l...

Low-level support of peripheral devices is one of the most demanding activities in a real-time operating system. In fact, the rapid development of new interface boards causes a tremendous effort at the operating system level for writing and testing low-level drivers for supporting the new hardware. The possibility of reusing legacy drivers in real-...

Effective power management in wireless networks of mo-bile robots requires a proper support from the operating sys-tem, which must allow the application to dynamically con-figure the onboard resources to save energy consumption while guaranteeing the required real-time and performance constraints. In this paper, we present the kernel mechanisms nec...

Most battery operated robots have to work under timing constraints to exhibit a desired performance and must adopt suitable control strategies to minimize energy consumption to prolong their lifetime. Unfortunately, energy saving strategies tend to reduce resource availability and, hence, degrade robot performance. As a consequence, an integrated a...

Mobile robot systems often operate under real-time constraints imposed by the interactions with the world in which they act. Such timing constraints are typically assigned to the various software activities (acquisition, control and actuation tasks) that run on the robot controller, and need to be enforced by the operating system that support the a...