Grant: Automotive Partnership Canada Project

Software-Intensive Systems provide mission-critical control and coordination among the wide variety of hardware components that make modern high-technology systems possible. Major industries, such as transportation, communications, aerospace, and health are now heavily dependent on software-based controllers because they can provide more functionality, are easier to implement, and are more malleable than electronic or mechanical controllers. Clean technologies of the future will rely on software to optimize use of resources. The size and complexity of the embedded software in these systems is growing rapidly, with more components to control, more decentralized decision-making nodes, demand for flexibility to handle changing needs and greater varieties of execution platforms. The result is a growing gap between expectations and practice: we can build very reliable software at the small scale, for tightly constrained problems, but building software for complex, evolving software-intensive systems remains an expensive, error-prone activity. NECSIS will bring together internationally-recognized researchers in software engineering and related disciplines, with automotive experts at General Motors of Canada, and software tool developers at IBM and several Canadian software startup companies, to build the foundation for engineering of complex software-intensive systems. In addition to the immediate benefits for the automotive sector, the project will allow Canadian software tool vendors to strengthen their lead in the market for development tools for automotive software. In the longer term, we expect to transfer these software technologies to other critical software domains, including communications, aerospace, energy, financial and medical systems. Canada is uniquely positioned to lead this research. Canada has one of the largest and strongest software engineering research communities in the world, with a depth of expertise in related disciplines, including programming languages, embedded systems, human factors, and cognitive science. It also has, per capita, the highest number of software engineering degree programs and specializations in the world. Increasing the capacity for high-quality software jobs is crucial if we