FREELY Project Awarded €1.2M FNR–FWF Funding
In cooperation with the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) supports closely integrated research collaborations between teams in Austria and Luxembourg through Weave, a bottom-up cross-European funding scheme designed to enable excellent collaborative projects. Weave streamlines international collaboration by allowing researchers from up to three participating European countries or regions to collaborate under simplified and harmonized funding procedures.
The international research project FREELY – FREquency-Enhanced Verification and VaLidation of Cyber-Physical Systems has been awarded more than €1.2 million in joint funding from the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The project marks a significant milestone for the Trustworthy Cyber-Physical Systems (TrustCPS) research group at TU Wien, led by Prof. Ezio Bartocci, with approximately €600,000 of the total budget allocated to his team. FREELY’s mission is to strengthen the trustworthiness of cyber-physical systems by developing frequency-aware verification and validation techniques that can uncover subtle faults and vulnerabilities arising from timing and performance effects, and by translating these advances into methods and tools that better reflect real-world operational conditions.
The project will address core research tasks such as
- designing new models and specifications that capture frequency- and timing-dependent behaviors of CPS,
- developing verification and testing approaches that combine rigorous formal guarantees with practical validation workflows,
- creating scalable analysis techniques for complex CPS stacks that span software, hardware, and networked components,
- providing actionable artifacts—benchmarks, datasets, and prototypes—that can be reused by the broader research community.
FREELY represents a closely integrated collaboration between TU Wien and the Software Verification and Validation (SVV) research group at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg. On the Luxembourg side, the project is jointly led by Dr. Drishti Yadav — former PhD student of Prof. Bartocci and recent Runner-up for the Informatics Europe Best Dissertation Award — together with Prof. Domenico Bianculli, current head of the SVV research group and successor of Lionel Briand, and Dr. Claudio Mandrioli, Marie Curie Fellow. Their combined expertise forms the core leadership team for the Luxembourg partner, complementing TU Wien’s strengths in trustworthy CPS analysis with leading competence in software verification and validation.
Over the next three years, FREELY will build strong scientific synergies between the TrustCPS group at TU Wien and the SVV group at the University of Luxembourg, advancing state-of-the-art methods for the verification and validation of cyber-physical systems. The collaboration will include intensive joint research activities and researcher exchanges, further strengthening ties between the two institutions. Beyond scientific outputs, FREELY aims to deliver practitioner-relevant guidance for designing and assessing CPS with stronger assurance guarantees, supporting safer and more resilient deployments in domains where reliability and security are critical.