The goal of the EMPRESS project is to develop a methodology and process for real-time embedded software development that supports management of evolution in a flexible and dynamic way. Evolution is hereby considered in a broad sense: evolution of requirements, systems and system families, system architectures, individual components, resource constraints (timing & memory requirements) and underlying hardware.

To reach this goal, an adaptable component-based architecture and enabling stable infrastructure will be developed, providing support for evolution at both development time as well as run-time. This new EMPRESS architecture and infrastructure will lead to:

• Support for controlled evolution of the system architecture and design
• Adaptable systems that can deal with dynamic reconfiguration (i.e. at run-time)
• Faster system development by adapting and extending existing systems in order to reduce time-to-market
• Easier development and lifetime support of product families with different degrees of functionality and/or hardware.

Management of evolution is more than ever crucial for successful embedded system development. Embedded systems are no longer pure closed, stand-alone systems, but often need to be connected to a network and interact with all kinds of devices. Each specific environment may have different requirements and may need a slightly different version of the embedded software. It should be possible to co-design all these versions and keep track of the related requirements. The addition of new devices to the environment will also have an impact on the embedded software. Systems might be built flexible enough to adapt themselves automatically and/or allow (remote) updates/upgrades of a part of the embedded software in a consistent and robust manner.

EMPRESS Detailed Info

• Information from the ITEA Symposium in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) on October 10-11 2002
  • Presentation of the EMPRESS project on the ITEA Methodology workshop (PDF format)
  • Posters EMPRESS on ITEA Symposium (PDF format)

For more information about the EMPRESS project, please contact the EMPRESS Project Leader:
Peter Kaiser (Fraunhofer IESE, Germany)