Abstract
The evolution of the electrical grid into a smart grid, allowing user production, storage, and exchange of energy; remote control of appliances; and, in general, optimizations over how the energy is managed and consumed, is an evolution into a complex information and communication technology (ICT) system. With the goal of promoting an integrated and interoperable smart grid, a number of organizations all over the world started uncoordinated standardization activities, which caused the emergence of a large number of incompatible architectures and standards. There are now new standardization activities that have the goal of organizing existing standards and produce best practices to choose the right approach(es) to be employed in specific smart grid designs. This paper follows the lead of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute/European Committee for Standardization/European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (ETSI/CEN/CENELEC) approaches in trying to provide taxonomy of existing solutions; our contribution reviews and relates current ICT state of the art with the objective of forecasting future trends based on the orientation of current efforts and on relationships between them. The resulting taxonomy provides guidelines for further studies of the architectures, and highlights how the standards in the last mile of the smart grid are converging to common solutions to improve ICT infrastructure interoperability.

Abstract
In order to increase the efficiency in the use of energy resources, the electrical grid is slowly evolving into a smart(er) grid that allows users' production and storage of energy, automatic and remote control of appliances, energy exchange between users, and in general optimizations over how the energy is managed and consumed. One of the main innovations of the smart grid is its organization over an energy plane that involves the actual exchange of energy, and a data plane that regards the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure used for the management of the grid's data. In the particular case of the data plane, the exchange of large quantities of data can be facilitated by a middleware based on a messaging bus. Existing messaging buses follow different data management paradigms (e.g.: request/response, publish/subscribe, data-oriented messaging) and thus satisfy smart grids' communication requirements at different extents. This work contributes to the state of the art by identifying, in existing standards and architectures, common requirements that impact in the messaging system of a data plane for the smart grid. The paper analyzes existing messaging bus paradigms that can be used as a basis for the ICT infrastructure of a smart grid and discusses how these can satisfy smart grids' requirements.

Abstract
This paper presents an architecture that supports Quality of Service (QoS) in an Arrowhead-compliant System of Systems (SoS). The Arrowhead Framework supports local cloud functionalities for automation applications, provided by means of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), by offering a number of services that ease application development. On such applications the QoS guarantees are required for service fruition, and are themselves requested as services from the framework. To fulfil this objective we start by describing the Arrowhead architecture and the components needed to dynamically in run-time negotiate a system configuration that guarantees the QoS requirements between application services.

Abstract
The need for maintenance is based on the wear of components of machinery. If this need can be defined reliably beforehand so that no unpredicted failures take place then the maintenance actions can be carried out economically with minimum disturbance to production. There are two basic challenges in solving the above. First understanding the development of wear and failures, and second managing the measurement and diagnosis of such parameters that can reveal the development of wear. In principle the development of wear and failures can be predicted through monitoring time, load or wear as such. Monitoring time is not very efficient, as there are only limited numbers of components that suffer from aging which as such is result of chemical wear i.e. changes in the material. In most cases the loading of components influences their wear. In principle the loading can be stable or varying in nature. Of these two cases the varying load case is much more challenging than the stable one. The monitoring of wear can be done either directly e.g. optical methods or indirectly e.g. vibration. Monitoring actual wear is naturally the most reliable approach, but it often means that additional investments are needed. The paper discusses the above issues and what are the requirements that follow from these for optimising maintenance based of the use of Cyber Physical Systems.

Abstract
Modern distributed real-time embedded applications have high processing requirements associated with strict deadlines. For some applications, such constraints cannot be fulfilled by existing single-core embedded platforms. A solution is to parallelize the execution of the applications, by allowing networked nodes to distribute their workload to remote nodes with spare capacity. In that context, this paper presents a holistic timing analysis for fixedpriority fork-join parallel/distributed tasks. Furthermore, we extend the holistic approach to consider the interaction between parallel threads and messages interchanged through a flexible time triggered switched Ethernet network, and we show how the pessimism on the worst case response time computation of such tasks can be reduced by considering the pipeline effect that occurs in such distributed systems. To evaluate the performance and correctness of the holistic model, this paper includes a numerical evaluation based on a real automotive application. The obtained results show that the proposed method is effective in distributing the load by different nodes, allowing a significant reduction of the worst case response time of the tasks. Moreover, the paper also reports an implementation of the model on a Linux library, called parallel/distributed real-time, as well as the corresponding results obtained on a real testbed. The obtained results are in accordance with the predictions of the holistic timing analysis.

Abstract
Smart grids play an important role in the modernization and optimization of the existing electrical grid, to accomplish the current European Union Energy and Climate targets. Smart grids require distributed applications to manage the grid more efficiently. The performance of the distributed applications impacts on the communications delay time and on the timely interaction with the devices located in the users' Home Area Networks. This paper presents the results of the ENCOURAGE project related to the development of a software platform to support smart grids. The work presented in this paper assesses four different middleware configurations and analyses the results on the delay performance tests. The results show that the mean end-to-end delay is between 310 ms and 453 ms in proper conditions. In terms of operational costs, the optimal configuration enables managing houses with less than 0.25 Euros per month per house. This paper justifies the maturity of the technology to support smart grids, and the possibility to transfer the ENCOURAGE project results to the industry.