European Center for Information and Communication Technologies

The performance of geothermal reservoirs is fundamentally controlled by the evolution of porosity and permeability, which in turn is governed by diagenetic processes interacting with coupled thermal, hydraulic, mechanical, and chemical (THMC) processes. Diagenetic reactions may either enhance reservoir hydraulic performance - through mineral dissolution, secondary porosity generation, or dolomitization-related volume changes - or degrade it via mineral precipitation, compaction, and cementation, resulting in reduced hydraulic connectivity and geothermal productivity. A process-based understanding of these interactions and feedbacks is therefore essential for reliable geothermal resource assessment.The Muschelkalk Formation in the Berlin–Brandenburg region of the North German Basin represents a promising geothermal target due to its favorable porosity, permeability due to brittle deformation, and temperature gradients at depth. However, its reservoir properties are strongly modified by diagenetic processes associated with halokinesis and fluid flow, including dolomitization, uplift-related deformation, and fluid-mixing corrosion. These processes generate pronounced spatial heterogeneity and uncertainty in reservoir performance, highlighting the need for a coupled, process-oriented modelling and analysis approach.We developed a physics-based THMC-coupled modelling framework to investigate diagenetic controls on geothermal reservoir behavior from reservoir to basin scale using integrated geological and petrophysical data from the Muschelkalk Formation. The objectives of our study are (1) the analyses of THMC-coupled diagenetic processes in the Muschelkalk Formation and their effects on porosity–permeability evolution, (2) quantify the interaction between thermal, hydraulic, mechanical, and chemical processes and their influence on reservoir heterogeneity, and (3) assess the impact of these coupled processes on geothermal performance through reservoir- and basin-scale doublet simulations.The modelling workflow is implemented using the GOLEM application (based on MOOSE framework) for coupled thermal–hydraulic–mechanical (THM) processes, which is coupled with PHREEQC to represent key geochemical reactions, enabling fully THMC-coupled model development and simulations. Despite the high computational demand of large-scale coupled modelling, this approach enables a comprehensive assessment of temperature, fluid flow, stress state, geochemistry, and petrophysical evolution. Overall, the study aims to provide a quantitative and process-based foundation for improving geothermal resource evaluation and long-term reservoir management in sedimentary basins.

Reducing car dependency supports the creation of a more sustainable transport system. However, automated vehicles (AVs) are predicted to increase the attractiveness of car travel and decrease the use of public transport and active travel. This current study explored how travellers’ intention to use AVs and their current travel behaviour influence their expectations of how they will use public transport and active travel, once conditionally automated (SAE L3) vehicles (L3 AVs) are available.Survey data (collected during the EU H2020 L3Pilot project) from among current car users from eight European countries (n = 9118) was used. Respondents were asked about their current travel mode usage, intention to use L3 AVs, and expected changes in the use of public transport and active travel once L3 AVs are available. The respondents were divided into nine user segments based on their level of intention to use L3 AVs and multimodality.Most respondents did not foresee changes in their use of public transport (62%) or active travel (67%). A higher intention to use L3 AVs increased the probability of a traveller expecting to decrease their use of public transport and, to a lesser extent, active travel. Multimodal travellers used public transport and active travel regularly and were also more likely to see a change, either up or down, in their use of public transport and active travel. The results suggest that L3 AVs may pose a challenge to the sustainability by encouraging current users of public transport and active travel to switch to personal AVs.

The study investigated the interrelationships between the UTAUT2 (Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology) constructs predicting intentions to use driverless automated shuttles. Survey data was gathered from individuals physically experiencing an automated shuttle in a mixed traffic environment on public roads in Trikala (Greece) as part of the CityMobil2 project. Structural equation modelling showed that intentions to use automated shuttles were most strongly driven by hedonic motivation, followed by performance expectancy and social influence. Performance expectancy mediated the relationship between effort expectancy and behavioural intention. This means that people's expectations of how difficult automated shuttles will be to use and their intentions to use them can be explained through their expectations around how these vehicles will perform. Technology savviness was a negative moderator of the relationship between social influence and performance expectancy and facilitating conditions, respectively. Tech-savvy individuals rely less on their social networks to nurture their beliefs that automated shuttles are useful and to have the necessary resources to use automated shuttles. Car use was a negative predictor of the intention to use automated shuttles. Future research should revisit the interrelationships between the UTAUT2 constructs and apply (quasi-) experimental studies to unravel the temporal interaction between constructs.Relevance to human factors/Relevance to ergonomics theoryThe study investigated the interrelationships between the UTAUT2 (Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology) constructs predicting intentions to use driverless automated shuttles. Survey data from individuals physically experiencing an automated shuttle in Trikala (Greece) as part of the CityMobil2 project was analysed by structural equation modeling. Examining the interrelationships between the UTAUT2 constructs enables us to identify underlying beliefs and devise adequate strategies to promote automated vehicle acceptance. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1463922X.2020.1814446.

We investigated public acceptance of conditionally automated (SAE Level 3) passenger cars using a questionnaire study among 9,118 car-drivers in eight European countries, as part of the European L3Pilot project. 71.06% of respondents considered conditionally automated cars easy to use while 28.03% of respondents planned to buy a conditionally automated car once it is available. 41.85% of respondents would like to use the time in the conditionally automated car for secondary activities. Among these 41.85%, respondents plan to talk to fellow travellers (44.76%), surf the internet, watch videos or TV shows (44%), observe the landscape (41.70%), and work (17.06%). The UTAUT2 (Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology) was applied to investigate the effects of performance and effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, and hedonic motivation on the behavioural intention to use conditionally automated cars. Structural equation analysis revealed that the UTAUT2 can be applied to conditional automation, with hedonic motivation, social influence, and performance expectancy influencing the behavioural intention to buy and use a conditionally automated car. The present study also found positive effects of facilitating conditions on effort expectancy and hedonic motivation. Social influence was a positive predictor of hedonic motivation, facilitating conditions, and performance expectancy. Age, gender and experience with advanced driver assistance systems had significant, yet small (<0.10), effects on behavioural intention. The implications of these results on the policy and best practices to enable large-scale implementation of conditionally automated cars on public roads are discussed.

Quality of Resilience (QoR) is natively connected to cloud computing to enable high-availability of services and secure access to information. QoR, in such dynamic contexts, cannot simply rely on reactive protection models, such as the primary-backup model supported by the Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP). Indeed, proactive mechanisms are required to enable an optimal QoR. In this paper we propose the use of multiple criteria that assess the performance of services operating in the cloud to trigger proactive resilient mechanisms. Such criteria, considering the maximization of benefits and decrease of costs, are combined through Multiple Attribute Decision Mechanisms (MADM) to optimize quality of resilience, going beyond mechanisms relying simply on network criteria. In this context, TOPSIS and MeTH are implemented to enhance data transfer services. Evaluation results, from the tests performed in the cloud environment of a Telecom Operator, demonstrate that MeTH is able to enhance high volume data transfers in comparison to TOPSIS and also to improve resilience support of SCTP, in the presence of different kinds of failures, network conditions and server loads.

Nowadays, several devices supporting OpenFlow versions beyond 1.0 are available on the market. However, existent OpenFlow testbeds like OFELIA do not provide support for such devices, therefore it is hard for the research community to explore and test the newest functionalities of the protocol in realistic environments. This paper gives a short overview of two different architectures investigated within the FP7 ALIEN project that both aim to overcome this limitation within the OFELIA experimental facility.

International cooperation on Software-Defined Networking (SDN), crossing the boundaries of Europe, the Americas and Asia, builds a strong foundation for pursuing experimental research through advanced programmable network testbeds. The EU-Japan jointly-funded project FELIX (FEderated Testbeds for Large-scale Infrastructure eXperiments) considers the definition of a common framework for federated Future Internet (FI) testbeds, which are dispersed across continents. This framework will enable an experimenter to (i) request and obtain resources across different testbed infrastructures dynamically; (ii) manage and control the network paths connecting the federated SDN testbed infrastructures; (iii) monitor the underlying resources; and (iv) use distributed applications executed on the federated infrastructures. This paper details six use cases that will be employed to validate the FELIX architecture and software platforms. We present our analysis and end-user considerations, highlighting the necessity to have a global vision of issues within the testbed network. Resource reachability and coherent use of physical connections are key factors in the use cases. This is particularly important when considering the simultaneous use of different technologies such as OpenFlow and the Network Service Interface (NSI) among others.

The first part of this issue features four papers that discuss advanced management techniques for Smart Objects. The socalled Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the cornerstones of the Future Internet. One illustrative example of the relevance of IoT in future network development is its growing adoption within the smart city paradigm, as a means to provide enhanced citizen services. In this sense, basic IoT technology is no longer at the purely academic research level, but is starting to be integrated to the the fabric of our daily activities. One of the elements that are required to support the successful deployment of this type of architectures is having the appropriate management mechanisms in place. The call for papers for this special issue was a result of a dedicated workshop on the management of smart objects. The workshop was collocated with the 4th International Conference on Mobile Networks and Management (MONAMI 2012), which was organized in close collaboration with the Technical University of Hamburg in September 2012 (see www.mon-ami.org/2012). The four papers which were accepted for publication in this special issue deal with management architecture alternatives, service development frameworks, security challenges, and the role that contextual information has in the Internet of Things. All in all, they provide a comprehensive outlook on some of the problems that need to be addressed for this type of deployments. It is worth highlighting that three of the works do really exemplify the need of real deployments and employ implementation over existing technologies to assess the feasibility of their proposed architectures, frameworks and techniques. In the first paper, JaeSeung Song et al. review some of the architectural choices for M2M networks. They start from the challenges that need to be addressed and discuss how the various standardization bodies (for instance, ETSI and 3GPP) are tackling them. They then present their approach for some of the technical functionalities required to control and manage M2M networks. Finally the authors describe a realization of a subset of the aforementioned techniques over a real testbed, using the service model proposed by the SENSEI European project. The authors use three performance indicators to assess the goodness of the techniques, namely the stability, the scalability and the robustness. The results, that are as well included within the CAMPUS 21 project, show that the proposed scheme can run on relatively low-memory devices, making it very attractive for realworld IoT deployments. One key success factor for IoT is the possibility to enable fast service creation, which is open to the general public, so that a user does not need to be an expert to be able to create his/her own service. In order to address these challenges, Sylvain Cherrier et al. propose, in the second paper of this special issue, a framework to deploy services to be used over IoT based on the composition of behaviours. They go beyond their previous proposal, D-Lite, which was based on Finite State Transducers, and propose a simpler way of modeling the interactions between IoT components. The BeC3 architecture also allows the exploitation of available modules and K. Pentikousis (*) European Center for Information and Communication Technologies (EICT), EUREF Campus Haus 13, Torgauer Strase 12-15, 10829 Berlin, Germany e-mail: k.pentikousis@eict.de

The demonstration will show the live access to the control framework of a pan-European OpenFlow testbed. The testbed spans five islands all over Europe, allowing experimenters access not only to virtual machines but to the switches interconnecting them. This extends the control of networking experiments beyond best-effort overlays to a real control of the network, its routing and forwarding functions itself. A first video explaining the registration process and the setup of a slice for a new network experiment can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p482T9O9HOg. A tutorial explaining (in short video sequences) the registration and use of the testbed is online on http://www.fp7-ofelia.eu.