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Software Reliability

AQUAS project

Staff and Funding

Principal Investigators: Dr Peter Popov

Co-investigators: Professor Lorenzo Strigini, Professor Robin Bloomfield, Dr Vladimir Stankovic, Dr Sebastian Hunt and Dr Ilir Gashi.

Funding: €278,000

Funding Source: The European Commission through H2020 ECSEL JU.

Duration: 3 years, starting 29 May 2017

Project Description

The AQUAS project (Aggregated Quality Assurance for Systems), funded by the European  ECSEL Joint Undertaking (Electronic Components and Systems for European Leadership), will investigate the challenges arising from the interdependence of safety, security and performance of embedded systems and aims at efficient solutions for the entire product lifecycle.

Safety, Security and Performance are interrelated concerns for developers of dependable systems and, in particular, for embedded safety-critical systems with hard real-time constraints.

Standard practices for analysing security, safety and performance are often disjoint and unable to shed light on their interactions, e.g. whether a design change to strengthen defences against a particular security threat will enhance or reduce safety in the absence of attacks. It is common to discover only at end of development – e.g. when a system has been implemented and subjected to initial assessment – that some of the safety, security and performance requirement have not been met, which in turn would require costly rework. AQUAS will address this problem by developing the concept of co-engineering for safety, security and performance with “interaction points”; points in the development lifecycle (spanning from early analysis and high-level design to detailed design and implementation) at which all three concerns – safety, security and performance – are evaluated and an acceptable trade-off between them is established.

These interaction points will be supported by system models and software tools for safety, security and performance assessment developed/used by the project partners. Some degree of integration between these tools will be sought in the project.

The work will be based on a number of concrete, industrial strength, case studies, contributed by the industrial partners spanning Space, Medicine, Transport and Industrial Control.

The City team is charged to lead the work on developing in detail the methodology of co-engineering with “interaction points”. We will rely on our expertise with probabilistic models for assessment and building assurance cases for critical systems.

Project Collaborators

  1. THALES Research & Technology (France)
  2. THALES Alenia Space Spain (Spain), project coordinator
  3. Integrasys SA (Spain)
  4. RGB Medical Devices, SA (Spain)
  5. City, University of London (UK)
  6. Austrian Institute of Technology (Austria)
  7. Università degli Studi dell'Aquila (Italy)
  8. THALES Italia - Air Operations (Italy)
  9. Siemens Industry Software (France)
  10. Magillem Design Services SA (France)
  11. ClearSy (France)
  12. Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (France)
  13. TrustPort, a.s. (Czech Republic)
  14. Institut Mines-Telecom, Telecom ParisTech (France)
  15. Tecnalia (Spain)
  16. Brno University of Technology (Czech Republic)
  17. All4Tec (France)
  18. Instituto Tecnológicio de Informática (Spain)
  19. Intecs Solutions SpA (Italy)
  20. Siemens AG Austria (Austria)
  21. RheinMain University of Applied Sciences (Germany)
  22. KPIT Medini Technologies AG (Germany)
  23. SYSGO AG (Germany)
  24. AbsInt Angewandte Informatik GmbH (Germany)