CD Laboratory for Embedded Software Systems

Research focuses on concepts, methods and tools for the - partially - automated design of safety-critical, embedded software systems (embedded systems). The main areas of application are automation and control systems in the automotive industry.

Embedded systems are computers that are part of another technical system, such as a car or aeroplane. The task of such a computer system is to detect the relevant changes in the technical system using sensors. Based on this, it controls the system in which it is embedded using so-called actuators. During development, there is a significant technological and methodological gap between embedded software and others, which needs to be closed. The research work carried out here is intended to contribute to this by inventing and developing innovative software technology for the construction of reliable, safety-critical, embedded automation and control software systems.

A central aspect of the correctness of an embedded system is its temporal behaviour. Model-based development requires suitable abstractions to explicitly describe the temporal behaviour of embedded software so that the executable program code can be generated from it. In the prevailing programming models, the temporal behaviour of software is often implicitly determined by the execution platform. The aim is for the timing behaviour to become an explicitly specified aspect of the design and for the corresponding code to be generated automatically for a specific execution platform. This allows the embedded software to be ported to another platform without changing the timing behaviour.

Not only this portability is created thanks to the research work here, but also the possibility that software services can be composed on distributed platforms without changing their temporal behaviour. Among other things, this is an important goal in the automotive industry in order to reduce the number of computer nodes (electronic control units) in the vehicle. Further research results make it possible to describe the hardware and software components of an embedded system and, based on this, to check whether certain product configurations are correct.