The Linux Foundation Launches First Linux-Based Civil Infrastructure Project

Civil Infrastructure Platform to provide software building blocks that support reliable transportation, power, oil and gas, and health care infrastructure

SAN DIEGO, Calif. (Embedded Linux Conference) – April 4, 2016 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP), an open source framework that will provide the software foundation needed to deliver essential services for civil infrastructure and economic development on a global scale. Early supporters of CIP include Codethink, Hitachi, Plat’Home, Siemens and Toshiba.

Civil infrastructure systems deliver critical services that are considered the lifelines of society: electric power, oil and gas, water, health care, communications, transportation and more. A 2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report estimated the annual global infrastructure demand is $4 trillion and will climb to nearly $9 trillion by 2025 due to the rapid growth of emerging markets. Countries like Brazil, China, and Japan, for example, are experiencing accelerated rates of growth in civil infrastructure projects to match the pace of production and trade with other countries around the world. Without an open source software platform leveraged across these multinational projects, infrastructure development faces duplication of effort, loss of development time, fragmentation and interoperability issues across other civil infrastructure systems.

“Linux and open source software can accelerate innovation, enable interoperability and transform technology and business economics for an industry. The Civil Infrastructure Platform is a great example of this opportunity,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “Through collaboration and open source development, developers will be able to build the common framework that will support some of society’s most important functions for decades to come.”

The Civil Infrastructure Platform will aim to work upstream with the Linux kernel and other open source projects to establish a “base layer” of industrial-grade software. This base layer will enable the use of software building blocks that meet safety, security, reliability and other requirements that are critical to industrial and civil infrastructure projects. As an open source software project built collaboratively across industries, the platform will address major challenges civil infrastructure projects face:

• Speed: As an open source solution, CIP enables engineers to save time building foundational elements shared across civil infrastructure projects both small and large;
• Cost: By developing CIP as an open source project, the development costs are shared and controlled by thousands of developers;
• Interoperability: CIP provides an open framework that integrates existing standards to support plug and play based system designs;
• Reliability: Based on Linux, CIP will provide a robust software base for system designs;
• Security and Safety: CIP will provide a software foundation that enables secure and safe delivery of critical services like power, gas, and water, even in times of disaster;
• Sustainability: The initial focus of CIP will help establish a long-term maintenance infrastructure for selected open source components, accounting for product life cycles of 10-60 years. To achieve this, CIP members will collaborate on agreed-upon areas required to meet civil infrastructure systems’ requirements.

Comments from early supporters
Hitachi
“Hitachi’s mission is to contribute to society through the development of superior, original technology and products. Thus, Hitachi has a long history of contributions that help provide society’s infrastructure such as power, water, urban and transport systems which require both safety and reliability. The aim of the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) is to provide a platform which satisfies these needs, and we believe that it will become a common, global platform through which we can achieve an even more comfortable and efficient society,” said Masaaki Iwasaki, laboratory manager of the OSS Technology Laboratory in the Research and Development Group of Hitachi, Ltd.

Siemens
“As a global leader in technology for products and solutions that drive our world’s infrastructure, Siemens is committed to address future challenges of digitalization by providing and supporting long-lived, robust and industrial-strength solutions,” said Marquart Franz, senior principal key expert for IT platforms at Siemens Corporate Technology. “With ever-increasing software intensity of our systems, partnering and open source development are necessary to ensure high quality core components based on IT technology. CIP will help us focus on these challenges.”

Toshiba
“We are committed to creating a secure, reliable and maintainable software platform for infrastructure systems by leading and contributing to CIP as a key member,” said Shigeyoshi Shimotsuji, executive vice president of Industrial ICT Solutions Company, Toshiba Corporation. “Collaborative open source development is the best way to not only overcome common issues but also to lead innovation for the future. Toshiba believes that CIP will become an essential software platform to improve our life.”

Yoshitake Kobayashi of Toshiba Corporation and Urs Gleim of Siemens AG will represent the project by presenting an overview talk of CIP at Embedded Linux Conference on Tuesday, April 5 at 9:00 am PT.

CIP is an independently funded software project hosted by The Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation’s projects span the enterprise, mobile, embedded and life sciences markets and are backed by many of the largest names in technology. For more information, please visit: http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org/ or https://www.cip-project.org/.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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