School of Computing professors James Cordy and Juergen Dingel, Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Thomas Dean and collaborators at seven other Canadian universities today received a five-year, $10.5 million grant from NSERC as part of the government’s Automotive Partnership Canada (APC) initiative. Led by Profs. Tom Maibaum of McMaster University and Joanne Atlee of the University of Waterloo, the Network on Engineering Complex Software Intensive Systems for Automotive Systems (NECSIS) is backed by an additional $6.1 million from General Motors of Canada and IBM Canada for a total investment of $16.6 million over five years, making it the largest APC grant yet to be awarded.
NECSIS focuses on a new computer software methodology called model-driven engineering (MDE), which promises dramatic improvements in automotive software developer productivity and product quality. MDE reduces the complexity of the designs and documents that developers work with, enabling them to test and verify models of automotive software before the computer code even exists, exposing safety, security and usability issues long before they make it to the product stage.
Profs. Cordy and Dean will work with their industrial colleagues on Model Pattern Engineering, which seeks a better understanding of the common patterns and structures of model use in automotive systems in order to allow for more disciplined synthesis, analysis and deployment of automotive software. Prof. Dingel will collaborate with colleagues at McGill University on Model Transformation, the problem of analyzing and relating automotive software models at the industrial scale, in order to allow for more effective analysis of complex interactions between subsystems that can lead to safety, reliability and usability issues.
For further information
Automotive Partnership Canada:
NSERC Industry Partnerships:
http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/Partners-Partenaires/Index_eng.asp
School of Computing:
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: