Ed Brinksma

 

Scientific Director of the
Embedded Systems Institute
Eindhoven , The Netherlands

 

The Challenges of Embedded Systems Engineering

Embedded system technology has become an important, if not dominating component in the realization of all sorts of high-tech products, machines, and infrastructures. As has been pointed out by many authors before, the complexity of the embedded software is not just a product of its growing size, but also results from the required relation between the software and its physical environment, both in terms of its execution on physical platforms and in its interaction with the system environment. This combination of digital control and physical phenomena makes it plausible that hybrid modelling and hybrid systems theory have a role to play in the design of embedded systems.
In this talk we want to examine what are the most pressing problems from an engineering point of view, in particular from the overall system perspective. The software complexity of high-tech systems is often related to the system integration, and not to the embedded software of individual components. The interpretation of the required integral functionality usually includes engineering disciplines beyond those related to hardware, software, and control, with particular methods, models, and tools. It remains to be seen whether deep (i.e. at the semantic level) integration of relevant models and methods will ultimately outperform more loosely coupled coalitions of specialized approaches that are closer to the cultures of the contributing disciplines. Another practically dominant concern often is the sheer size of the collective system software. Alternative approaches to design, therefore, must scale up and support the management of large quantities of design software (programs, models, specifications, etc.). In our presentation we will draw on a number of big industry-as-laboratory projects carried out by the Embedded Systems Institute.

Bio Sketch

Ed Brinksma is Scientific Director of the Embedded Systems Intitute (ESI) in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. ESI is a public-private research institute (2007: 125 fte) that carries out collaborative research on embedded systems engineering with academic and industrial partners. Ed is full professor of computer science both at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, where he heads the Formal Methods and Tools (FMT) research group, and at the Department of Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology. He is also affiliated as Adjoint Professor with Aalborg University and the Danish Centre for Embedded Software Systems CISS. Ed's research has always been concerned with the modelling and analysis of complex (communication and/or embedded) systems, as well as their practical application. In his early career he was responsible for the ISO International Standard 8807 on LOTOS, a specification language for communication network systems. He has also been very active in the development of methods and tools for model-based testing. His current interests are in modelling and analysis of hard and soft real-time systems, hybrid systems, and testing of real-time systems.