Toshiba : to Participate in the "Civil Infrastructure Platform" Project

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Toshiba Corporation to Participate in the 'Civil Infrastructure Platform' Project

April 5, 2016

TOKYO--Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) has announced its participation in the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP), a collaborative project targeting civil infrastructure systems and hosted by the Linux Foundation. As a project founder and board member, Toshiba will contribute experience gained in applying Linux to a wide variety of products - from consumer electronics to control systems for power plants - with a special emphasis on providing a secure and reliable common software platform that is maintainable over the long-term.

The Linux Foundation is a non-profit consortium that supports Linux and the development of collaborative software projects like 'Automotive Grade Linux (AGL)', a Linux platform for connected cars, and the 'Cloud Foundry Foundation', which aims to extend current PaaS. CIP is a new project that involves the cooperation of several industries, and its main goal is to develop open source software (OSS) for civil infrastructure systems.

The global trend for IoT/ICT technologies for civil infrastructure systems to be network- capable is making adoption of Linux and OSS in civil infrastructure systems increasingly important. These systems must give the highest priority to safety and security, while at the same time delivering reliability, sustainability and interoperability. Traditionally, companies have worked separately to tackle these issues, but these are common concerns that can best be solved collectively, and industry increasingly recognizes the need for the flexible support that can be achieved by collaborating in open source development.

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In seeking to provide solutions for these common problems, CIP will supply an OSS platform for civil infrastructure systems that emphasizes safety, security, reliability, and maintainability for life cycles in the range of 10-30 years.

Toshiba is joining the CIP as a board member, and will be a key member of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC). Toshiba will also participate in the development of OSS for civil infrastructure systems in collaboration with other members of CIP.

■Civil Infrastructure Platform
https://www.cip-project.org/

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Notes:

*1: A vehicle equipped with an ICT terminal that can fetch sensor data regarding the vehicle status or road conditions, for example. Network-based collection and analyses of these data is expected to introduce new added value.

*2: PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, refers to a hardware or OS platform offered as an internet service for running application software, as well as similar services or business models.

*3: OSS, (Open Source Software) is software that can be freely accessed, used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone (https://opensource.org/faq#osd). OSS enables the use of good quality software by any user, and encourages the development of better software by allowing continuous fixes to the source code, which is considered to be public intellectual property. One of most famous OSS is the Linux kernel, developed by Linus Torvalds and the Linux community.