The CivilInfrastructure
Platform

Overview
Civil infrastructure systems are at the very heart of modern societies. Technical systems are
ubiquitously responsible for supervision, control, and management of infrastructure that
supports an array of human activities. Examples include electric power generation and transport,
water and wastewater management, communication, transportation, healthcare and others.

These networks deliver essential services, provide shelter and support social interactions and economicdevelopment. As requirements for reliability, connectivity and feature-richness increase, the amount ofsoftware needed to implement and maintain such systems has grown to unprecedented levels.
The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) Initiative, hosted by the Linux Foundation and driven by theworld’s leading manufacturers of civil infrastructure systems, aims at providing a base layer – a set ofindustrial grade core open source software components, tools and methods to create Linux-basedembedded systems that meet the requirements of modern societal infrastructure.
Software-intensive, complex base systems that do not create differentiating value for products,
yet need to be provided by each and every manufacturer, are jointly developed, extended andmaintained. The results of this collaborative development are provided as open source software(OSS). CIP focuses on providing a basis for the implementation of safety-critical systems using
standard Linux components, and on delivering super long-term support (envisioned duration:15+ years) of selected versions of the Linux kernel. Of course, these very ambitious goals canonly be fully realised if many companies and organisations join the effort!
CIP believes that sharing efforts, working closely with the upstream community, and contributing
back to projects is essential to ensure the success of the initiative.

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Base Platform Requirements
Several of our requirements are unique to the considered fields and usually do not play any
substantial role in consumer or server products. A bug in a mobile phone that unexpectedly
ends a phone call or requires a reboot is a nuisance to the user. A similar bug in a brake control
system, a signal-box or a light-signalling system can cause severe harm to people, including lossof life. CIP thus needs to ensure that its base layer is trusted software of the highest industrial
quality, which necessitates:• Reliability: Uninterrupted operation over extended periods of time is the rule,
not the exception.
• Functional safety: Civil infrastructure systems are often cyber-physical in that they interact
with the external world, sometimes using very heavy machinery. The platform must provide
an appropriate basis so that higher layers can ensure that people will not be harmed.
This is only possible when the base components are combined into appropriate softwarearchitectures.
• Security: The increasing use of IT technologies in industrial systems, together with a strongtrend towards more and more connectivity in IoT components, increases the possible attack
surfaces for criminals. Information security, identification and backporting of relevant fixes,
and sound security update mechanisms are among the core concerns of CIP.
• Real-time capabilities: Automation and control tasks appear abundantly in industrial
settings, and deterministic response times are often required. CIP will not develop
individual solutions, but will ensure cooperation with or provide sponsorship for the existing
approaches to real-time enhanced Linux.

Sustainability
Infrastructure products face product life-cycles of 10 to 60 years and software components needto keep up with such life-cycles. The CIP project helps to build sustainable systems at sustainable
costs by reducing overall development costs. By using CIP’s base platform, maintenance costs
become predictable (and small) by minimising the number of regression problems by extensive,
central testing and by providing components prepared for further certification. CIP’s solid,
conservative update strategy gives advice on when firmware updates are unavoidable, andprovides software architectures that prevent the need for constant updates as much as possible.

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Platform
CIP aims to build and maintain a pre-production base layer of industrial quality that all members
can share to implement commercial products. Building a civil infrastructure platform requires
more than just a kernel. It also requires:• Key software components: Linux kernel, bootloader, shell, utilities and key libraries areincluded in the CIP base layer and will be provided with appropriate updates and backports
over the platform’s lifetime.
• Reproducibility and traceability: It is not possible to maintain a system without also
maintaining those key tools that are used to produce that system from scratch, together withthe associated metadata. Among other things, a complete toolchain that continues to workfor decades is crucial. Achieving traceability requires CIP to produce the platform througha transparent process in which inputs, outcomes, tools and states are kept for inspection,
ensuring that CIP software and processes can be trusted in the future.
• Debugging and maintenance: Regardless of how old a system is, new bugs will cropup. Packages to debug the system and perform basic maintenance actions are need to beprovided. For an industrial quality base layer, maintainability is a core factor at every stageof its design and production. CIP understands that this effort is shared with upstreamcommunities.
CIP will publish the selected software packages and tools that form the Civil Infrastructure
Platform, and commits to following open source development and delivery practices using
OSS licenses and an upstream first policy. All components will be verified to work on selectedindustrial hardware reference platforms. This enables interested parties to establish completehardware/software solutions in minimal time that can be used as a basis for vendor-specificproduct innovation.

More Information
The project’s website, www.cip-project.org, provides more information and also describes options
for corporate membership and community participation.

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