Thales Nederland, a member of the Thales group, was founded in 1922 as a production plant for mechanical naval gunfire control systems. The company’s research led to the development of advanced radar systems, electro-optical equipment, and a world-class combat management system.
At present, Thales Nederland employs some 1700 people and its main products and services include surveillance equipment, combat management systems, weapon control equipment, programme management and combat system integration, training and Integrated Logistic Support. Over the years, the company has gained extensive expertise in implementing procurement programmes together with local industries in customer countries and to cater for comprehensive Transfer of Technology programmes.
Thales Nederland has earned a distinct reputation in overall combat system design and integration. The company’s capabilities are not only applied to new naval construction programmes, but are equally relevant to the modernisation or upgrade of existing naval platforms.
Current sensor production and development programmes include a number of unique designs utilizing the latest state-of-the-art in digital beam forming, sensor integration, active phased array antennae, solid state technology and data processing.
Thales’s product portfolio contains products that are suited for every class of naval vessel, from small high-speed intercept craft to large ocean-capable patrol boats and corvettes. The wide range of sensors available allows sensor suites to be tailored to the precise requirements of any type of ship or weapon system and any mission.
For Thales the importance of INAETICS lies in the fact that – together with experienced and qualified partners – we define and create an open software architecture which offers robustness in the domain of time critical missions. This architecture will enable the high availablility of Thales’ sensors.
The network company Alliander, based in Arnhem, consists a.o. of the business units Liander, Endinet and Liandon. The aggregated revenues of the business units for 2012 were approximately € 1.7 billion.
Liander grid operator forms the core of the Alliander group, accounting for about 85% of revenues and manages the gas and electricity networks in the provinces of Gelderland, Friesland, Flevoland, Noord-Holland and parts of Zuid-Holland. These activities are subject of the Dutch regulatory framework. Endinet Ltd. is responsible for the operation, maintenance and design of the electricity and gas grids in the regions of Eindhoven and Oost-Brabant. Liandon is also a member of the Alliander group and designs, realizes and maintains complex energy infrastructures for customers for high-voltage, complex medium-voltage and industrial installations. Alliander also holds some Germany based activities under its German holding company Alliander A.G. Activities in Germany include grid management and the design and maintenance of public lighting in the City of Berlin.
As our society becomes more and more inter and hyper connected, the dangers of attacks on electricity networks increases every day. For Alliander, advanced SCADA monitoring in time critical systems is the key to control and the safeguarding of our energy infrastructure. Being part of the INAETICS consortium enables Alliander to gain technical insights on advanced monitoring technology from other sectors (such as defense) and to apply this to the energy domain. The INAETICS project is relevant from an economical and technical perspective. Alliander intents to foster and examine the INAETICS innovative software architecture framework in order to develop practical technology demonstrators.
Luminis was founded in 2002 with the aim to provide its customers with strategic advantages through distinctive and competitive information technology solutions. To this end the organization is set up as a network of business units in which consulting, technology research, product development and business ventures are combined. The decentralized network employs about 125 people across the Netherlands with offices in Amsterdam, Apeldoorn, Arnhem and Rotterdam. Luminis develops PulseOn, a digital personalized learning environment, and actively participates in open source projects such the Amdatu Platform, an OSGi based platform for highly scalable and dynamic cloud based applications.
INAETICS is important to Luminis because it provides a unique opportunity to expand her technological expertise, capabilities and business in the field of high-tech environments. As one of the founders of the Amdatu Platform, Luminis aims to extends and improve this system with respect to the overall INAETICS goals in term of robustness and focus on infallibility system aspects.
OpenSplice B.V. is a full daughter of PrismTech Ltd. an acknowledged leader in advanced software integration and infrastructure solutions. The company develops, markets, and supports a wide range of high-performance, standards-compliant, and cost-effective middleware products which are further differentiated by unique technical capabilities and advanced productivity tools. PrismTech’s products “Power Net centricity” by enabling the event-driven communications, end-to-end qualities-of-service, and software optimization required to best exploit available resources, to better synchronize events, and to support system agility. PrismTech’s product’s differentiators are most highly valued in markets that require business-critical and mission-critical systems. These systems are pervasive in a number of vertical markets, such as Telecom, Mil/Aero, Finance, Utilities, Transportation, and Civil Administration.
OpenSplice B.V. develops PrismTech’s flagship product ‘OpenSplice DDS’, a commercially supported opensource implementation of the Object Management Group’s (OMG) Data Distribution Standard (DDS) for distributed systems.
For OpenSplice BV, INAETICS incorporates a unique combination of emerging technologies and standards that directly relate to observed trends in customer-requirements and the systems they build. The INAETICS project seamlessly fits with the OpenSplice product roadmap which addresses the expansion of support for fault-tolerant real-time data-distribution from the traditional local-area network (LAN) environment towards large-scale cloud-based systems including their related ‘edge-devices’ (highly embedded sensors).
SecurityMatters was founded in 2009 as a spin-off from the University of Twente. Based on over 10 years of academic research, the company develops and sells IT security solutions. The solutions are state-of-the-art network monitoring and intrusion detection systems to detect the newest and most sophisticated cyber attacks. SecurityMatters thereby focuses on so-called next-generation technologies that can be developed in close cooperation with academic research.
The importance of INAETICS for SecurityMatters lies in the technical and economic potential of an intrusion detection solution for industrial control systems. Especially the new aspects of intrusion prevention and monitoring of industrial networks are of great importance.
The University of Twente (UT) has 3,000 employees and about 8,000 students. ICT-related research takes place in the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT), the largest academic ICT research centre in Europe. Information security is one of the CTIT’s strategic research directions. The CTIT is one of the founders of the Dutch 3TU.
The Distributed and Embedded Security group (DIES) forms the heart of the information security research at the University of Twente. The DIES group works on data security, network security and cybercrime prevention. The past two years the DIES group participated in various initiatives on protection of critical infrastructures. In particular, the DIES group participated in two national projects which, together with partners from the gas, water and energy sectors, with the goal of increasing the security of critical infrastructure networks.
The DIES group is the birthplace of SecurityMatters, and doing groundbreaking research into the security of industrial control systems. The INAETICS project allows for the DIES group to deepen in close cooperation with Thales and SecurityMatters.