VARiability In safety critical Embedded Systems

In order to succeed or even to survive, manufacturers and system integrators must be able to deliver new products with speed, diversity, high quality, and at an acceptable cost.

Embedded Systems (ES) are rarely entirely conceived from scratch. Companies developing ES constantly face decisions about using and adapting existing products or product assets versus new developments. Determining the long term risk and benefits of such decisions is very challenging.

Complex ES are often produced by assembling parts supplied by different partners. This adds extra complexity that all actors in the supply chain need to manage.

Safety critical ES product ecosystems require mechanisms allowing safe and trusted integration of ES components. Furthermore, safety critical ES need to comply with stringent safety standards. Determining the safety level based on individual parts’ safety characteristics is far from straightforward.

The main goal of the VARIES project is to help ES developers to maximize the full potential of variability in safety critical ES. The objectives of this project will be therefore (i) to enable companies to make informed decisions on variability use in safety critical ES; (ii) to provide effective variability architectures and approaches for safety-critical ES; and (iii) to offer consistent, integrated and continuous variability management over the entire product life cycle.

The VARIES project will deliver the VARIES Platform: a complete, cross-domain, multi-concern, state-of-the-art reference platform for managing variability in safety critical ES. Special attention will be given to aspects specific to safety critical ES, in particular the impact of reuse and composition on certification.

In addition to this ambitious goal, the VARIES project will create a Center of Innovation Excellence (CoIE) for managing variability in ES. The VARIES CoIE will support the European ES industry on the 3 aforementioned objectives.