2. Architecture

The overall approach combines the SOO mobile entity concept with the SO3 operating system, running on top of the Agency Virtualizer (AVZ) hypervisor. Micro-services are deployed as SO3 capsules — strongly isolated containers that run alongside a full Linux environment (the agency domain).

General architecture of the edge environment

Fig. 2.1 General architecture of the edge environment

The dashed MICOFE rectangle in the figure above highlights the components developed as part of the project. With the exception of Rust support — which could not be delivered due to time and budget constraints — all other components were implemented, tested, and validated.

The main building blocks are:

  • The EMISO engine, running in the agency domain user space, which manages the lifecycle of the SO3 capsules.

  • Portainer, used as the Container Orchestration User Interface (COUI), running on the host PC.

  • The MUSL libc runtime and the SO3 syscall layer, which allow standard applications to run unmodified inside capsules.

  • The C++ user-space runtime, built on top of the MUSL-aligned C runtime.

  • The capsule / LVGL integration, which gives graphical capsules access to the display through a backend/frontend driver pair and the AVZ hypervisor.