Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - AQUAS (Aggregated Quality Assurance for Systems)

Teaser

There is an ever greater complexity of the systems we engineer in modern society. This includes facing the convergence of the embedded world and the open world. The complexity creates increasing difficulty to provide assurance for interrelated system quality attributes...

Summary

There is an ever greater complexity of the systems we engineer in modern society. This includes facing the convergence of the embedded world and the open world. The complexity creates increasing difficulty to provide assurance for interrelated system quality attributes including safety, security and performance. This is particularly the case for real-time systems where human life is at stake such as in the transportation, aerospace, medical and industrial control domains. Safety, security and their relation is essential for these kinds of systems. However their interdependence and with performance is poorly understood not least because traditionally different teams within the same organisation have had responsibilities for safety and security.

These interacting non-functional system properties are difficult to track and balance both within a phase of the product lifecycle and across phases. Design trade-offs normally arise, e.g. with security mechanisms damaging performance of some subsystems, which in turn may be essential for system safety. Often a balance found early in the lifecycle, e.g. in requirements engineering, must be changed during the detailed design. The problem is further compounded by the need to maintain safety-critical systems which typically have a very long lifetime of decades.

These new classes of systems require that we sufficiently master the methods of dealing with the complexity of interacting system-level qualities to build and maintain them effectively. It is therefore of the outmost importance that we bring co-engineering into mainstream practices. Achieving the associated advanced solutions will have many impacts including:

• Realising the capability to efficiently analyse the trade-offs between system quality attributes at all stages of the product lifecycle.
• Design breakthroughs for architecting thanks to an effective support of the engineering(especially for digital transformation).
• Providing a more effective ability to implement systems, reducing the engineering cost for building and maintaining these systems.

Leading this endeavour will provide a decisive competitive advantage for organisations when dealing with standards for safe & secure pervasive systems and meeting client performance requirements.

Given the need to have all impetus on bringing co-engineering into the mainstream, the focus will be on unlocking the traditional approaches. This is especially to avoid the risk of activities becoming too dispersed and losing the much needed market impact and uptake. However it should be clear that these collaborative techniques will have other particular benefits. For instance, the enabling of easier entry of companies to supply chains or system integration, and also the improved connectedness facilitating design for Systems of Systems and Internet of Things. Furthermore, there are other driving factors that call for co-engineering including:

• Industry calls for innovative solutions to design its systems to cope with the extremely competitive global market (e.g. from China, India …).
• General need for improved integrated engineering approaches, for the overall life cycle of our products (including evolution towards SoS, IoT, Cloud).
• Reduction of risks related to new standards development (DO-326A, D0-356…) and evolving existing ones.
• Advancement across the European Market and across several domains.
• Increase turn over tool licensing.
• Improve tool features and capabilities.
• Increase consultancy and services by capturing new domains and market (EU).

The ECSEL Joint Undertaking is particularly important for realising the type of market impact intended by AQUAS, with the work necessitating large scale collaborative funding between industry, SMEs and research institutions – and with aligned targets. Within the ECSEL JU work plan, AQUAS particularly addresses the topics managing complexity, safety and security for Design Technology, Architectures Pri

Work performed

The main achievements in AQUAS in Year 2 are listed below:

- The AQUAS Consortium has implemented their first Demonstrators. These were presented in D2.3

- The Consortium have defined and evaluated Baselines and KPIs for multiple goals within the UCs

- There has been an extensive trial of combined analyses in Demonstrators

- First implementations of AQUAS concepts in tools. These have been provided to the UCs

- As a consequence of all the above the Consortium obtained multiple publications in Proceedings of different Conferences and Journals

- There has been a significant engagement and extension of the External Advisory Board

- AQUAS organized and coordinated the CE-Elite Workshop at HiPEAC Conference 2019

- An official AQUAS video was created and made available on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvrH9Gu7re0), AQUAS Webpage (http://aquas-project.eu/) and AQUAS pages on different social networks

- Finally, all 10 deliverables corresponding to this reviewing period have been submitted on time.

Final results

N/A

Website & more info

More info: http://www.aquas-project.eu/.