For the time being, companies and organisations are being forced to compete in utterly complex and globalised environments, facing massive natural, economic, and technological challenges on a daily basis. Addressing these challenges would be impossible without a proper approach that helps them identify, measure, understand, and control the performance of their organisations. Lean principles and techniques rise as a solution. This paper justifies and proposes the use of lean principles and techniques to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) in project-based organisations based on their organisational and operational needs. The research focuses mainly on the identification and categorisation of KPIs through a qualitative approach, based on systematic literature review (SLR) of performance indicators, project management, and project success. As a case study, an analysis of relevant information of an R&D and innovation project-based organisation, such as quality manuals, a benchmarking process, internal studies, and surveys regarding what success means for different kinds of stakeholders and for the organisation itself was conducted. As a result, this research is of a high value for project-based organisations, especially those that are not apprised of how to correctly formulate a series of KPIs, or whose path to it is still not clear. View Full-Text

With the advent of 5G technologies, vertical markets have been placed at the forefront, as fundamental drivers and adopters of technical developments and new business models. Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs) are gaining traction in multiple vertical sectors, as key assets to generate, process, and distribute relevant information for the provision of value-added services. However, the enormous potential of SUAVs to support a flexible, rapid, and cost-effective deployment of vertical applications is still to be exploited. In this paper, we leverage our prior work on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and SUAVs to design and build a multi-site experimentation testbed based on open-source technologies. The goal of this testbed is to explore synergies among NFV, SUAVs, and vertical services, following a practical approach primarily governed by experimentation. To verify our testbed design, we realized a reference use case where a number of SUAVs, cloud infrastructures, and communication protocols are used to provide a multi-site vertical service. Our experimentation results suggest the potential of NFV and SUAVs to flexibly support vertical services. The lessons learned have served to identify missing elements in our NFV platform, as well as challenging aspects for potential improvement. These include the development of specific mechanisms to limit processing load and delays of service deployment operations.

Safety-critical systems are evolving into complex, networked, and distributed systems. As a result of the high interconnectivity among all networked systems and of potential security threats, security countermeasures need to be incorporated. Nonetheless, albeit cutting-edge security measures are adopted and incorporated during the system development, such as latest recommended encryption algorithms, these protection mechanisms may turn out obsolete because of the long operational periods. New security flaws and bugs are continuously detected. Software updates are then essential to restore the security level of the system. However, system shutdowns may not be acceptable when high availability is required. As expressed by the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) “the research in the area of patching and updating equipment without disruption of service and tools” is needed. In this article, a novel live updating approach for zero downtime safety-critical systems named Cetratus is presented. Cetratus, which is based on a quarantine-mode execution and monitoring, enables the update of non-safety-critical software components while running, without compromising the safety integrity level of the system. The focus of this work lies on the incorporation of leading-edge security mechanisms while safety-related software components will remain untouched. Other non-safety-related software components could also be updated.

Research and education networks (RENs) worldwide, attracted by the benefits of software-defined networking (SDN) for services involving traffic engineering (TE) such as bandwidth on demand (BoD), have started to include SDN in their network evolution plans. BoD allows users to request end-to-end connectivity services of known duration with a guaranteed bandwidth. Considering such a scenario, this paper presents a set of algorithms and two novel data structures for provisioning of the BoD service in SDN-based RENs. First, network snapshots are used to represent a period of time during which resource availability remains constant. Second, the network snapshot tree (NSTree) allows for different network snapshots to be arranged hierarchically using a time-based node aggregation policy. Additionally, each network snapshot stores multiple alternative paths for each source-destination pair. This innovative approach allows for the network resource utilization and number of service requests being accepted in the network to be improved compared to the most common approach of a single shortest path being considered for each destination. As a result, our approach allows for network resource utilization to be improved by approximately 30%. Furthermore, the two-phase procedure used to pre-compute alternative paths and perform admission control makes it possible to achieve response times on the order of milliseconds, enabling the real-time provision of the service.

Establishing collaboration strategies with interdisciplinary networks in research is a crucial success factor for the companies in any sector, especially in manufacturing for aeronautics. In the aeronautical supply chain, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) lack of these types of alliances with universities and other research institutions, which could give them access to shared and specialized knowledge, may strictly limit those companies to learning from their own experience. One way to break this dynamic for industrial companies is to be an active part of research, development, and innovation centres. In this paper, a study to create new advanced manufacturing centres is presented, centres whose activities are focused on Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) 5–7. The approach is based on a project management methodology, and it is applied to the aeronautical sector in the Basque Country. An initial study of the international experience and state of the art in this type of facility, as well as an analysis of the current socioeconomic environment of the Basque Country are presented. A benchmark study was done to identify the key processes that this centre must promote for this initiative to succeed, or those areas of knowledge that can make or break the initiative. Finally, the results showed a definitive picture for establishing an advanced manufacturing centre in the Basque Country. This work lays both the foundations of knowledge in the sector and the difficulties noted, so it can serve as guidance for similar initiatives.

Railway communications are closely impacted by the evolution and availability of new wireless communication technologies. Traditionally, the critical nature of railway services, the long lifecycle of rolling stock, and their certification processes challenge the adoption of the latest communication technologies. A current railway telecom trend to solve this problem is to design a flexible and adaptable communication architecture that enables the detachment of the railway services—at the application layer—and the access technologies underneath, such as 5G and beyond. One of the enablers of this detachment approach is software-defined networking (SDN)—included in 5G architecture—due to its ability to programmatically and dynamically control the network behavior via open interfaces and abstract lower-level functionalities. In this paper, we design a novel railway train-to-ground (T2G) communication architecture based on the 5G technological enabler SDN and on the transport-level redundancy technique multipath TCP (MPTCP). The goal is to provide an adaptable and multitechnology communication service while enhancing the network performance of current systems. MPTCP offers end-to-end (E2E) redundancy by the aggregation of multiple access technologies, and SDN introduces path diversity to offer a resilient and reliable communication. We carry out simulation studies to compare the performance of the legacy communication architecture with our novel approach. The results demonstrate a clear improvement in the failover response time while maintaining and even improving the uplink and downlink overall data rates. View Full-Text

In the incoming internet of things (IoT) applications, smart sensors expose services to interact with them, to be parameterised, managed and maintained. Therefore, fine-grained end-to-end access control enforcement is mandatory to tackle the derived security requirements. However, it is still not feasible in very constrained devices. There is an innovative access control model that conveys an expressive policy language and an optimised codification for tight and flexible access control enforcement in very constrained devices. Such tightness enabled by the expressiveness of the policy language leads to detailed policy instances that might impact on the performance and therefore, in the feasibility and further applicability. In this context, this study assesses how the policy length impacts the performance of the establishment of a security association through the protocol named Hidra proposed by such an adapted access control model. Consequently, the notable results of the performance evaluation prove the feasibility and adequacy of this access control model for the new smart IoT scenarios.

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.

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.

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.