Informatics
Work description
The growing adoption of autonomous mobile manipulators in industrial environments shifts to software the responsibility for decisions that were previously local and deterministic: fleet coordination, mission assignment and synchronization. with production management systems now depend on distributed components and on the network connecting them. When those components rely on 5G communications, they gain low latency and wide coverage, but they also inherit the failure modes of a shared infrastructure outside the factory's direct control. In this context, the unavailability of a task manager, the loss of the state of an ongoing mission or a momentary interruption of the connection may have direct consequences on the production line and/or give rise to inconsistency in the system. Ensuring fault tolerance in these systems should be an operational requirement: critical data must survive failures and essential services must recover without human intervention, within a time window compatible with the operation. - Review of the state of the art in fault tolerance applied to distributed industrial systems, with particular attention to 5G network communication contexts. - Survey and analysis of the resilience and operational continuity requirements of the system's critical components, namely the Task Manager and the Production Manager. - Identification and characterisation of the relevant failure modes, including component failure, communication failure and partial unavailability of the 5G infrastructure. - Design of fault tolerance mechanisms at the data level, using replication techniques, ensuring the persistence and integrity of critical data. - Design of fault tolerance mechanisms at the service level, including state monitoring, failure detection and automatic re-instantiation of components. - Preparation of technical documentation and contribution to the project's reports and deliverables, as well as to any scientific publications.
Academic Qualifications
A bachelor's degree in Informatics Engineering, Computer Science or a related field
Minimum profile required
- A pass mark of 15 or above (0–20 scale) in a curricular unit in the area of fault tolerance or intrusion tolerance, or in a distributed systems curricular unit with a demonstrable component in these topics.- Knowledge of database management systems.- Knowledge of data replication and distributed agreement mechanisms.- Command of the English language, written and spoken.
Preference factors
- Practical experience with data replication and distributed agreement mechanisms. - Experience with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and with service monitoring. - Experience with fault injection methodologies and experimental evaluation of systems. - Familiarity with the Robot Operating System (ROS). - Familiarity with industrial communication protocols.
Application Period
Since 13 Aug 2026 to 26 Aug 2026
Centre
High-Assurance Software