Embedded systems
There are computers that really look like computers with the standard equipment you generally need (screen, keyboard, mouse, …). There are other computers that hide themselves into all kinds of products and they are called embedded systems. In the life of a citizen in the 21st century, at least in the most developed countries, it’s becoming hard to avoid becoming the user of those embedded systems. Whether you are calling your friends, driving your car or watching TV, embedded computers are everywhere.
The immediate consequence of this situation is the obligation for all citizens to rely on computers and software when they are not necessarily conscious they can depend on it. The more those computers are used, and the more their software is performing functions, the more we are facing the risk of being victim of their potential failures.
In the space domain, there is no exception to this general rule : computers and software are everywhere. They control the trajectory of a rocket at launch time, keep a satellite on its planned trajectory in order to perform the mission, or guide a spacecraft through complex manoeuvres up to the final docking to the International Space Station. The success of a space mission is thus largely dependent on the reliability of flight software and this is especially true when spacecrafts require a high level of autonomy without ground visibility or need to cooperate to achieve complex mission goals.
In this difficult context, a series of facts may raise some concerns about the future of system and software engineering :
- System and software design are mostly based on empirical approaches.
- The Embedded Systems industry at large has an increasingly hard time at mastering the ever-rising complexity of new-generation systems. The resulting difficulties more and more lead to schedule and cost overruns in their design and development and, equally to loss of quality, with unacceptable high probabilities of operational failures.
- The various EmS industrial sectors are so much focussed on their strategic short-term objectives and on the importance of their next challenges that they are less and less able to cooperate. There is a need for actions to overcome this and ASSERT was prepared with the firm intention to contribute to this battle...
Funding
A project of that size and level of ambition requires a critical mass of partners and competences to be properly achieved. With only the financial contributions coming from partners such projects could be difficult to setup. National and/or European support is thus required to make those initiative feasible.
Assert-project has received the financial support of the European Commission under the Framework Programm six (FP6) context. This project was one of the three Integrated Project selected in 2003 in the topic "embedded systems".
