The CEDRIC Laboratory is going to host the HDR defense of Daphne Tuncer, Researcher at Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées (ENPC), Institut Polytechnique de Paris (IP Paris), France.
When: 12 May, 2025, 10 AM CET
Where: Room 33.1.27C, 2 Rue Conte 75003, Paris
Title: On the complexity of managing communication and information system infrastructures
Abstract: Communication and information systems build on complex infrastructures that constitute a critical artefact on which today’s human societies build to function. They comprise a diversity of hardware and software components that use a wide range of technologies to exchange data, store information and make computations. These infrastructures compose a dense ecosystem of networks that operate at different geographical scales, are administrated by different entities and follow different forms of governance. This makes the management of communication and information system infrastructures challenging.
To address these challenges, the networking community at large and the network management community in particular, have been working towards making the automation of network systems a reality, with the ultimate vision of systems that can self-operate, self-maintain and self-manage. To understand how to handle network resource management complexity and automate management procedures, it is essential to consider the network, the management system and the operator as an indissociable triptych.
This report provides an overview of the research efforts carried out to investigate how to handle the complexity associated with the deployment, operations and maintenance of communication and information system infrastructures and their networks. The results of the research developments have been contributing to the design of novel network resource management approaches and architectures for the deployment of advanced network applications and digital services. In particular, the work presented in this report has been focusing on three main themes for the automation of network resource management: i.e., 1) how to design flexible, adaptive and modular decision-making models for the automation of network resource management, 2) to investigate abstraction(s) for high-level system management, applicable to interconnected, heterogeneous cyber-physical infrastructures, and 3) to develop quantitative and qualitative assessment models of complexity tailored to network management.
By building on the outcomes of this past work, the report presents a future avenue of research whereby the complexity of network management is apprehended as a multi-dimensional, multi-domain and multi-stakeholder problem. In particular, the proposed project aims to investigate how to design solutions for the deployment and operations of heterogeneous cyber-physical systems (e.g., smart buildings, electric mobility infrastructure) that are not only cost-effective but also efficient with respect to the resources they require to operate.
This necessitates addressing key challenges, including revisiting abstractions and their different declinations as enablers of automation; exploring the interaction of network operators with management tools and interfaces in the face of a shift in computing towards data-driven models; and investigating the modularity of management plane implementations in different contexts (e.g., from datacenters to connected buildings).
The project proposes to revisit methodological developments in network management to implement an orchestration functionality for these heterogeneous cyber-physical systems, including the application of intent technologies to represent system management objectives in a standardised way, the modelling of the integration between these systems and their operations as modular functions to compose, and the deployment of a data-based middleware layer as an interface between these systems.
Daphne Tuncer Publications: http://dtuncer.com/publications.html
