SPES 2020: Innovation Alliance for Embedded Systems

The alliance project "Software Platform Embedded Systems 2020" - SPES 2020 for short- was initiated by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as a strategic funding project in the area of embedded systems. As partners of the consortium, the University of Kaiserslautern and the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE will also execute important workpackages. During the project's initial duration of three years, a total funding of 23 million euros will be available.

Two workpackages from the so-called central projects of SPES 2020 will keep the scientists in Kaiserslautern busy, with the researchers of the local university working hand in hand with engineers of the Fraunhofer Institute of Experimental Software Engineering IESE.

Prof. Peter Liggesmeyer, professor of computer science at TU Kaiserslautern and one of the directors of Fraunhofer IESE, sees his work confirmed by the selection of the consortium partners: "It has become impossible to picture our daily lives without so-called embedded software systems: 90% of the microprocessors produced worldwide are used for such electronic components." Their complexity keeps increasing continually and thus the challenge to design secure systems also becomes stronger. In Kaiserslautern, these issues have been focused on for many years: "Our acceptance into the nation-wide alliance project with a funding of 1.5 million euros overall is in recognition of what we have achieved so far and motivates us to meet the upcoming challenges", said Peter Liggesmeyer.

In the context of this major project, three positions will initially be created at TU Kaiserslautern and three others are planned at Fraunhofer IESE.

The university working groups under the leadership of Professor Rombach and Professor Liggesmeyer will work especially in the areas of empirical evaluation of methods and processes for the safety analysis of safety-critical systems developed in a model-based way. The various departments of Fraunhofer IESE with their industry experiences will complement this basic competence with their expertise proven in practical applications. The focus will be particularly on the change of paradigms in developing embedded systems - from individual programming of single systems to model-based processes, including automated code generation and quality assurance.

The lessons thus learned will be incorporated into application projects from the domains of avionics, medicine, automotive technology, and automation technology. The respective industrial partners are primarily major corporations, whose research and development potential makes them particularly suitable for the amount of work expected.

The innovation alliance aims at developing an integrated, high-performance methodology for the development of embedded systems, especially with regard to mastering their constantly increasing complexity, independent of the intended application domain. The extensive, strategic alliance project will include professional experts from, at present, five universities, three research institutes, and 15 industrial companies, including such giants of their domains as Siemens AG, Robert Bosch GmbH, or the aerospace company EADS.

The program, which was started as an innovation alliance between high-technology research institutions and leading industrial companies, will be managed by Technische Universität München.

Contact:
Alexander Rabe
Phone: +49 (631) 6800 1002
Email: alexander.rabe@iese.fraunhofer.de
Fraunhofer-Institut für Experimentelles Software Engineering IESE
Fraunhofer-Platz 1
67663 Kaiserslautern

Source: Fraunhofer-Institut für Experimentelles Software Engineering IESE

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