FTSD

Breaking news!

The FutureTech team are delighted to announce that Communicating Process Architectures 2007(CPA2007) is to be hosted by the University of Surrey, and sponsored by AWE. The conference will run in July 2007.

For the first time, the conference will include special interest sessions on co-design issues - both practical and theoretical. More details on the conference, including submission procedures, will follow in late 2006.

Objectives

• Understand the issues in hardware/software co-design
• Provide formal approaches to co-design problems

Source and duration

FutureTech is a 3 year project, running from January 2005 to December 2008. The project is funded by the Atomic Weapons Establishment

Background

A growing research area is the partioning of a systems design into a combination of hardware and software components, interacting in real-time as part of an embedded system. This arrangement is often referred to as co-design (see, for instance here). The FutureTech project aims to investigate issues concerning co-design, with particular attention paid to the needs for high levels of assurance in the behaviours of the implementation of such systems, and the presentation of arguments for those high levels of assurance.

Co-design is the partioning of a system into hardware and software components from system specifications, possibly automatically. In Software Engineering and Formal Methods communitys, there has been much recent interest in the combination and unification of notations, for instance CSP||B, and Circus. The motivation for these combinations stems from the need for greater integration of techniques, for more flexible approaches to systems specification and design, and enhancement of tool (and automation) support.

The problem of how to refine and partition an abstract formal specification and compile it down to hardware and software components, whilst maintaining the specification's integrity, remains unsolved. This project is aimed towards a serious attempt at solving the theoretical problems associated with formal co-design. The recent advances made in integration of formal techniques mentioned above are expected to lead the technical thrust of the project, and are the main reason why the aims of the project are now seen as viable, and timely.

Work on the project is exploratory, and considers, amongst others, the following broad areas:

• Requirement capture
• Formal specification
• Partitioning
• code generation
• Verification and proof
• Scalability