European Research Targets Collaborative Design of Embedded Systems

Products containing embedded computers have transformed our lives in the last thirty years but they are among the most challenging of systems to design. The teams that work on embedded products cover many disciplines, including mechanical and electrical engineering, physics and software. Different design models have to be built to meet the needs of each discipline, so that responding to a new product opportunity or a change in components involves considerable re-working, leading to sub-optimal designs and long development lead times.

The European Union’s research project DESTECS (Design Support and Tooling for Embedded Control Software) is about developing methods and tools that combine continuous-time application system models with discrete-event controller models, using co-simulation1 and multi-domain fault injection2 tests to build more reliable and safer real-time embedded systems. The objective of DESTECS is to support a cost-effective development of dependable embedded control systems. The target is to substantially reduce the effort spent in design iterations compared to current best practice for fault-tolerant embedded control systems.

Approach

DESTECS will advance model-driven development by focusing on two engineering domains: (1) discrete event modeling of controllers and architectures and (2) continuous-time modeling of physical systems. By coupling these domains through co-simulation, cross-domain design issues can be tackled even in the early stages of a design process. DESTECS will exploit co-simulation as a basis for modeling faults and analysing fault tolerant designs for predictably resilient systems.

The DESTECS design methodology will be supported by an open tools platform to provide an integrated design environment. The platform will be flexible to allow an easy extension to other engineering domains, and it does not replace current industry practices but it will support the heterogeneity of tools and encourage collaborative design by integration of domain-specific best practices.

The achievements of the project will be monitored through the realization of industrial case studies by the industrial partners and new exemplar challenge problems gathered from DESTECS’ Industrial Follow Group, which consists of 16, mostly larger, companies.

Consortium

DESTECS has been awarded a research grant in the 7th Framework programme on ICT. The project team consists of 3 academic groups and 4 companies of which 3 are SMEs: University of Twente, NL, dr Jan Broenink; Newcastle University, UK, dr John Fitzgerald; Engineering College of Aarhus, DK, prof Peter G. Larsen; CHESS, NL, dr Marcel Verhoef; Controllab Products bv, NL, Christian Kleijn; NeoPost Technologies bv, NL, dr Dusko Jovanovic; Verhaert, B, Frederik Wouters. The total budget is 3.8 M€, of which 2.75 M€ is funded by the European Commission. The project runs from 1-1-2010 to 1-1-2013.

Contact

Website: www.destecs.org