In terms of diagnosis, planning and treatment, when a dental patient needs a complex restoration or presents a temporomandibular disorder, it is necessary to reproduce the mandibular movements out from mouth. The best tool for this purpose is the virtual articulator. Virtual articulators enable a design that takes into account the kinematics necessary for the design process of dental restorations and at the same time, avoids possible collisions. The location of the hinge axis constitutes just one step in attempting to reproduce mandibular movement. However, the importance of this step arises from the fact that almost all movements start at the axis and return to it. Therefore, this study focuses on the virtual acquisition of the patient’s mandible rotation axis (kinematic axis) using reverse engineering devices.

Which didactic methodology is the most appropriate considering the contents of my subject? What are the activities that suit my possibilities? What evaluation method is fair and formative for the competences of my subject? The teaching team of the subject of Graphic Expression in the Engineering of the Engineering School of Bilbao (UPV/EHU) decided to act in order to improve the teaching-learning process. For this purpose a restructuring of the entire subject that would be carried out by making a disruptive approach to redesign the subjetc was thought. The main objective was to capture the students’ interest in the subject and, as a result, improve the success rate. For this purpose, a restructuring of the whole subject was sought by applying educational methodologies and updated technologies according to the new requirements by the students and the teachers. The main idea is to give importance to the knowledge and ability of extracting the necessary data to represent graphically the reality, identifying the real problem posed with a method of theoretical resolution. At the same time, to minimize the importance of memorizing steps, data can be consulted in the bibliography. With the objective of implementing the main ideas above, the teaching team inquired about pedagogic models, and found that the Flipped Classroom suited the necessary characteristics, mainly the effective use of time in the classroom. Finally, it is important to notice that the creative process followed has allowed the teaching team to unify criteria and agree on results. This way, all members have felt involved in the project.

21st century engineers have to confront global society’s competitiveness, so technical and technological competences have to be enriched with critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, communication and creativity skills. To this end, teaching methodologies like Project-Based Learning (PBL) together with cooperative work, to cover the educational needs of future engineering graduates, should be promoted in class. This paper presents the SimABP project, an action where we simulate a work experience in the CAD subject presenting a real challenge to the students, tightly linking academy to real labour reality. In addition, we also define specific rubrics for evaluating the competences and we show the most significant results obtained. Our action has increased the satisfaction and motivation of the students, and the marks obtained in technical skills have been higher.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) trends, where high connectivity is envisioned, are giving rise to new applications, services, and paradigms, such as smart cities. Due to this connectivity and information sharing features, security, and privacy protection mechanisms need to be implemented, which may become obsolete at some future time. Software updates are, then, crucial. However, software updates requiring system shutdown and restarts might not be acceptable from the business and service point of view when high availability is demanded. In this paper, a mixed-criticality software architecture and design for a building energy management system, built upon the Cetratus runtime framework, is presented, where partitioning techniques are employed to ensure temporal and spatial isolation. Through this framework, software updates are dynamically accomplished, without the need for system shutdown and restarts. A live patching example is also presented, where customers privacy is enhanced by means of homomorphic encryption.

This paper presents a novel method to evaluate the maturity of projects and organizations in order to minimize the risks. It is assumed that the higher the project management maturity (PMM) level is, the higher the performance of projects is, but a high PMM level requires investment. So far, the maturity of the major stakeholders to ensure they have enough competence to perform successfully, project complexity and success have not been considered by maturity evaluation methods. in this paper we go a step forward and investigate the relationship between those elements. As a result of this research, we present a novel model to evaluate the maturity of the Client and the Contractor and the complexity of the projects.. We have applied our model in qualitative research studies and demonstrate that it is a concise and useful framework for companies that seek optimum maturity levels. Our method is useful when the trust among organizations is low, and it provides stronger position to organizations facing a business opportunity.

This paper presents a solution to increase bandwidth utilization and to reduce the time necessary to recover from network failures in multi-domain bandwidth on demand service provisioning. The proposed solution is based on software-defined networking (SDN) in order to implement novel traffic engineering (TE) techniques. In fact, most standards development organizations and researchers agree that the logically centralized control plane and high programmability of SDN can revolutionize TE with novel and powerful strategies. In this context, the dynamic path computation (DynPaC) framework, relies on the OpenFlow SDN protocol to provide resilient layer 2 services with bandwidth guarantees within OpenFlow domains. In order to make DynPaC support multi-domain service provisioning, it has been extended with an additional operational mode and REST API calls, making it fully compliant with the Network Services Interface-Connection Service protocol. In this way, DynPaC can behave as a network resource manager (NRM) in the network services framework. As a result, the presented solution is the first OpenFlow-enabled NRM with resiliency capabilities that implements novel TE strategies that enhance the utilization of network resources. In order to validate the proposal, it has been implemented using the ONOS network operating systems and several tests have been conducted using diverse service demand patterns. The obtained results show that DynPaC is suitable to be used as an NRM and that the number of accepted services increases thanks to the flow reallocation mechanism included in the framework, achieving in this way a better utilization of network resources.

Higher interconnectivity among devices, machines, the cloud and humans is envisioned in the actual trend of automation, also known as Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). These industrial control systems, which may require high availability and/or safety related capabilities, are no longer isolated from the corporate environment or Internet. Software updates will be needed during the product life cycle, due to the long service life, the increasing number of security related vulnerabilities discovered on these industrial control systems and the high interconnectivity desired in IIoT. These updates aim at fixing all these security weaknesses, bugs and vulnerabilities that could appear, while the required safety integrity levels are ensured. Security-related concerns have just been addressed by the safety engineering community, because of the increasing number of cyber-attacks against safety-critical systems, such as Stuxnet. Moreover, system shut-downs caused by software updates could not be plausible when high availability is required. Typically, in order to perform the software update, the whole industrial process or the production is halted, so that the software upgrade is safely applied. However, this scenario might not be applied in critical infrastructures, such as nuclear or hydro- electrical power plants, where these production and service interruptions are not acceptable from the business and service point of view. This article presents an analysis of existing dynamic software updating techniques, which may be applied for safe and secure industrial control systems. These techniques aim at updating the running code, without the need of a halt and restart, increasing the availability of the industrial system.

Security is a key aspect in the development of innovative and valuable services based on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). In the last years, the research area related to CPS security has received a significant attention, dealing with the design of different architectures, security protocols, and policy models. However, beyond monitoring data publishing behavior, CPSs are expected to offer some manageability-related services, and the proper fine-grained and flexible access control model remains challenging due to both criticality and feasibility. In fact, traditional security countermeasures cannot be applied directly to any sensor in CPS scenarios, because they are too resource-consuming and not optimized for resource-deprived devices. Different access control models facing both feasibility and enforcement tightness are arising as a way to solve the mentioned issues related to resource limitations, and this study provides a deep survey on them.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network paradigm that decouples the control from the data plane in order to provide a more structured approach to develop applications and services. In traditional networks the routing of flows is defined by masks and tends to be rather static. With SDN, the granularity of routing decisions can be downscaled to single TCP sessions, and can be performed dynamically within a single data stream. In this context We propose a novel approach – coined as micro flow aware routing – aimed at implementing routing of flows based on the properties of transport-level information, which is closely related to the type of application. Our proposed scheme relies on the early characterization of the flow based on statistical predictors, which are computed over a time window spanning the first exchanged packets over the session. We evaluate different window lengths over real traffic data to examine the Pareto trade-off between the earliness of flow characterization and its predictive accuracy. These results stimulate further research towards ensuring the practicality of the scheme.

Network monitoring is a paramount aspect for the detection of abnormal and malicious activity. However, this feature must go hand by hand with mitigation techniques. On SDN environments, control techniques may be easily developed as a result of its ability for programming the network. In this work, we take advantage of this fact to improve the network security using the sFlow monitoring tool along with the SDN controller. We present an architecture where sFlow is in charge of detecting network anomalies defined by user rules, while the SDN technology is responsible to mitigate the intrusion. Our testbed has been implemented on Mininet and the SDN environment is governed by Opendaylight controller and the OpenFlow southbound protocol. Experimental validation demonstrate that our system can effectively report various types of intrusion associated with the reconnaissance phase of an attack.

The incoming smart Industry 4.0 envisions fully interconnected scenarios to boost the efficiency, quality and performance of industrial processes. In this context, communication technologies play a pivotal role as the key tool that enables the interconnection among a priori isolated business processes, making the most of them and resulting in more powerful business-level applications and decision-making. In this paper, we present the application of two cutting-edge telecommunication technologies, namely, network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN), to the manufacturing industry, showing how these technologies can help improve manufacturing processes. We introduce the SN4I (Smart Networks for Industry) experimental facility, which is an NFV- and SDN-aware communication network that connects the University of the Basque Country with the Aeronautics Advanced Manufacturing Centre. In this regard, NFV provides a flexible way to deploy virtual services, while SDN allows the programming of network elements to interconnect these virtual services by means of virtual links or virtual networks. Both technologies guarantee full data and performance level isolation, ensuring that virtual services running over the same physical hardware or virtual links deployed over the same physical network will never interfere with one another. With the integration of NFV and SDN in manufacturing networks, the design, evaluation and deployment time of services that include computational, storage and networking resources is drastically decreased, facilitating innovation and optimizing network and hardware resource utilization.

Railway systems have evolved considerably in the last years with the adoption of new communication technologies. Aiming to achieve a single European railway network, the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) emerged in Europe to substitute multiple and noninteroperable national railway communication systems. This system and its security strategies were designed in late 1990s. Recent works have identified vulnerabilities related to integrity, authenticity, availability, and confidentiality. In the context of defining effective countermeasures to mitigate potential vulnerabilities, these vulnerabilities have to be analysed. In this article we introduce a framework that attempts to challenge ERTMS security by evaluating the exploitability of these vulnerabilities.

Upcoming smart scenarios enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) envision smart objects that provide services that can adapt to user behavior or be managed to achieve greater productivity. In such environments, smart things are inexpensive and, therefore, constrained devices. However, they are also critical components because of the importance of the information that they provide. Given this, strong security is a requirement, but not all security mechanisms in general and access control models in particular are feasible. In this paper, we present the feasibility assessment of an access control model that utilizes a hybrid architecture and a policy language that provides dynamic fine-grained policy enforcement in the sensors, which requires an efficient message exchange protocol called Hidra. This experimental performance assessment includes a prototype implementation, a performance evaluation model, the measurements and related discussions, which demonstrate the feasibility and adequacy of the analyzed access control model.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) rely on networks that interconnect sensors and actuators to perform measurement, supervision and protection functions in different domains, such as transportation and industrial automation control systems. These networks must be able to support mobile wireless CPSs that are demanding new requirements related to flexibility and heterogeneity without compromising the Quality of Service (QoS). However, it is hard to determine, for example, the optimal resource allocation or the most reliable paths without global network information. In this way, the Software-Defined Networking paradigm is being considered as key to overcome such emerging needs. In particular, an SDN controller is able to establish paths between sensors and actuators according to bandwidth, latency, redundancy, and safety considerations. Thus, the goal of this paper is to review the state of the art of SDN approaches applied to mission-critical applications by identifying trends, challenges and opportunities for the potential development of software-defined cyber-physical networks.

Since the appearance of OpenFlow back in 2008, software-defined networking (SDN) has gained momentum. Although there are some discrepancies between the standards developing organizations working with SDN about what SDN is and how it is defined, they all outline traffic engineering (TE) as a key application. One of the most common objectives of TE is the congestion minimization, where techniques such as traffic splitting among multiple paths or advanced reservation systems are used. In such a scenario, this manuscript surveys the role of a comprehensive list of SDN protocols in TE solutions, in order to assess how these protocols can benefit TE. The SDN protocols have been categorized using the SDN architecture proposed by the open networking foundation, which differentiates among data-controller plane interfaces, application-controller plane interfaces, and management interfaces, in order to state how the interface type in which they operate influences TE. In addition, the impact of the SDN protocols on TE has been evaluated by comparing them with the path computation element (PCE)-based architecture. The PCE-based architecture has been selected to measure the impact of SDN on TE because it is the most novel TE architecture until the date, and because it already defines a set of metrics to measure the performance of TE solutions. We conclude that using the three types of interfaces simultaneously will result in more powerful and enhanced TE solutions, since they benefit TE in complementary ways.

Upcoming smart scenarios enabled by the Internet of Things envision smart objects that expose services that can adapt to user behavior or be managed with the goal of achieving higher productivity, often in multi-stakeholder applications. In such environments, smart things are cheap sensors (and actuators) and, therefore, constrained devices. However, they are also critical components because of the importance of the provided information. Therefore, strong security is a must. Nevertheless, existing feasible approaches do not cope well with the principle of least privilege; they lack both expressiveness and the ability to update the policy to be enforced in the sensors. In this paper, we propose an access control model that comprises a policy language that provides dynamic fine-grained policy enforcement in the sensors based on local context conditions. This dynamic policy cycle requires a secure, efficient, and traceable message exchange protocol. For that purpose, a security protocol called Hidra is also proposed. A security and performance evaluation demonstrates the feasibility and adequacy of the proposed protocol and access control model.

Emerging communication services in the intelligent transportation systems (ITS) scenario have recently considered the provision of Internet services because this fact will aid in safety purposes and will offer a wide scope of applications to end users. Consequently, and considering the ITS scenario a specific mobile networking context (several connection capable nodes moving at the same time), mobile communications should provide the required security level as well as efficiency. In this regard, mobility management is the key aspect in this scenario so the mobility protocol underneath has to ensure those properties. In this article, thanks to the security and efficiency properties it provides from its design, we consider the NeMHIP protocol an appropriate alternative for managing mobility in the ITS context. Nevertheless, NeMHIP entails challenges when being introduced in the current legacy Internet architecture. In order to deal with these issues, this article proposes a compatibility strategy. This strategy involves a novel naming resolution procedure based on the definion of an evolved DNS resolution process. As a result, mobile networks can securely and efficiently move along the current Internet, using most common communication services transparently. We have implemented the compatibility solution in a testbed, validated its functionality and design correctness to assess its feasibility. Obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed strategy.

The connected vehicle is becoming a reality. Internet access onboard will indeed increase road safety and security thanks to the cooperative networking that it is expected among vehicles, roadside units and the Internet. Moreover, this connectivity will bring innovative driving assistance services and infotainment alike services for end users. This fact is endorsed by standardisation bodies like the ETSI or the 5G-PPP that are actively working on the definition of these innovative services and setting their requirements. The connected vehicle poses technological challenges that need to be addressed. The mobility has to be managed regardless the location of the vehicles to ensure connectivity. At the same time the required security and performance levels for the applications need to be ensured. In this paper, we present a realistic simulation framework to evaluate vehicular applications while the protocol to manage the mobility, NeMHIP, is running underneath. The simulation framework is based on the integration of the OMNeT++, SUMO, VEINS and VsimRTI simulation tools. Obtained results have been compared with the requirements defined by the 5G-PPP automotive white paper, ITU-T Y.1541 and 3GPP TS 22.105 standards with satisfactory results. Thus, we demonstrate that the NeMHIP protocol is suitable because it fulfils the requirements of the applications while it provides an essential mobility service. In addition, this work shows the validity of the simulation framework.

Railway signalling systems play a key role in the intelligent rail transportation. These systems rely on underlying communication networks that carry state information and commands between the control centre and the train fleet. These networks are currently involved in a migration process towards IP technology. Within this migration, the Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology in communication core networks is becoming ubiquitous. Besides, in the end-side equipments, the adoption of TCP/IP protocol stack allows the introduction of new protocols, such as MPTCP, that provide end-to-end redundancy in equipments with multiple network interfaces. However, there are still two open questions before being able to introduce this technology in railway signalling networks. On the one hand, the standard Multipath TCP (MPTCP) protocol does not define how an effective redundancy can be applied in equipments with a unique network interface. On the other, redundancy without path diversity does not provide the needed resiliency for facing correlated communication errors. In this paper, we present two contributions to address these two open points. Firstly, we define and test a MPTCP extension that combines spatial and temporal redundancy. Secondly, we describe a procedure for combining MPTCP and MPLS technology in order to guarantee the required end-to-end path diversity.

Aware of the benefits that Software-Defined Networking (SDN) can entail for traffic engineered services, the pan-European National Research and Education Network (NREN) Géant has started to work on an SDN-based solution to provide Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) services. The proposed solution relies on a framework called DynPaC, which is able to provide resilient L2 services taking into account bandwidth and VLAN utilization constraints. DynPaC has been extended to be compliant with the Network Services Interface-Connection Service (NSICS) protocol, which makes the SDN-based BoD solution multidomain capable. The demo described in this paper demonstrates the establishment of multi-domain BoD services across OpenFlow and non-OpenFlow domains, how the traffic is limited at the networking devices to enforce the QoS constraints, also selecting the optimal intra-domain paths during the process, and how the traffic is re-routed to alternative pre-computed paths in case of link-failure, always without disrupting the service provisioning.