The CESAR project finished by end of June 2012 and as one of the finished projects, we were invited to be present at the ARTEMIS & ITEA Co-Summit. Representing the CESAR consortium, the CESAR Coordinator AVL and the Technical Project Manager SAGEM accepted the ARTEMIS Recognition Award for CESAR.

TOWARDS A VISION OF AN INTEROPERABILITY STANDARD FOR CRITICAL EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

>> click for contributions to the ATC 

March 1, 2012, Nuremberg: Eleven projects and initiatives from ARTEMIS, ITEA, national funding schemes and open collaboration communities came together to discuss the future of an interoperability standard. This was the ARTEMIS Technology Conference 2012 on Interoperability.

The event was hosted by CESAR and co-hosted by iFEST, MBAT and pSAFECER in conjunction with the Embedded World 2012 and the ARTEMIS Spring Event 2012. To increase the variety of interoperability approaches presented, a call for contributions had been launched within ARTEMIS, ITEA and national research communities. It resulted in an interesting group of contributing projects and initiatives, each highlighting a specific aspect of interoperability:

·         CESAR (ARTEMIS)

·         MBAT (ARTEMIS)

·         iFEST (ARTEMIS)

·         OSLC (Open Community)

·         POLARSYS (Eclipse Industry Working Group)

·         pSAFECER (ARTEMIS)

·         SAFE (ITEA)

·         SMECY (ARTEMIS)

·         SOFIA (ARTEMS)

·         R3-COP (ARTEMIS)

·         SPES XT & SPES 2020 (National German)

Most of the engineering environments were built years ago, connecting home-grown tools and tools designed by different vendors from different disciplines. The resulting landscape is very heterogeneous and lacks a common concept of interoperability. Current demands are increasing the need for interoperability: faster time to market, reduction of costs, even more distributed teams and an increasing number of external partners to collaborate in a product life cycle. An interoperability concept that is able to support all these demands needs to be based on a technology that has proven its ability to drive such environments and is scalable enough for future challenges, e.g. web based services, with a loosely coupled linked data approach.

Such an interoperability concept involving many groups of stakeholders (tools vendors, industrial end users, integrators, software and hardware engineers, project leads, managers, etc.) cannot be driven by a single group. At the ARTEMIS Technology Conference, project presentations, poster sessions and a key note speech by Bola Rotibi CEng., Research Director at Creative Intellect Consulting Ltd, led to discussions which increased understanding of the challenges, commonalities and differences in the projects' and initiatives' approaches to interoperability.

An essential question addressed during the ARTEMIS Technology Conference was: "Is it enough to have one interoperability standard - or will we need more than one?" The participants agreed that it might not be sufficient to have one common standard but rather a number of standards leading to a layered approach from general to specific applications.

Among the challenges identified were quality barriers due to disconnected workflows and tools. In the past, many teams focused on improving their local work environment, e.g. improving the quality of the requirement process, introducing better testing methods or raising productivity by adopting agile implementation methods. The workflows between teams as well as between disciplines (e.g. HW and SW engineering) are still disconnected. There is a big need for interoperability between the artefacts of the engineering and the product lifecycle. The main goals to achieve are: collaboration, traceability, reporting and automation.

Shedding light on this multiphysics / multidiscipline aspect of Embedded Systems Engineering, the participants recognized the need to consider the interfaces to other disciplines. It is however seen as too early in the process to include all disciplines and to extend interoperability to the full System Engineering approach. One of the participants stated in this context "let's first clean our house". In contrary, this strategy does not apply to the question of in-house interoperability versus inter-company interoperability, as these have to run in parallel so as to benefit from each other. A close connection to process and method optimization and adaptation is also necessary.

Optimizing the in-house processes might lead to a new role in the development process. In many organizations, the questions "how do I organize the architecture" and "what are the models in the background" cannot sufficiently be answered today. To do so, the participants recognized the need for the new role of the "System Engineering Environment Architect". There is a strong need for education and training to meet this industrial demand.

Although the approaches presented during this day are different with regard to scope and granularity, they are homogeneous in the big picture. A need for a generic basis to with specific applications has been recognized. An example is the large scope CESAR Interoperability Specification (IOS), where compatibilities with the iFEST approach have already been recognized in the past. Events like this ARTEMIS Technology Conference are a first step in the right direction. It is now up to all stakeholders involved to push the harmonization of approaches forward and to foster and continuously improve an interoperability concept. Establishing such a concept cannot be done overnight and also not by enforcement. It?s more like an ongoing journey - and the journey has just begun.

Report by: Rainer Ersch, Siemens AG & Ingrid Kundner, AVL List GmbH