By Bjorn Andersson,
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Research, Technology & System Solutions

Many DoD computing systems—particularly cyber-physical systems—are subject to stringent size, weight, and power requirements. The quantity of sensor readings and functionalities is also increasing, and their associated processing must fulfill real-time requirements. This situation motivates the need for computers with greater processing capacity. For example, to fulfill the requirements of nano-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), developers must choose a computer platform that offers significant processing capacity and use its processing resources to meet its needs for autonomous surveillance missions. This blog post discusses these issues and highlights our research that addresses them.

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By Douglas C. Schmidt
Chief Technology Officer

A key mission of the SEI is to advance the practice of software engineering and cyber security through research and technology transition to ensure the development and operation of software-reliant Department of Defense (DoD) systems with predictable and improved quality, schedule, and cost. To achieve this mission, the SEI conducts research and development (R&D) activities involving the DoD, federal agencies, industry, and academia. One of my initial blog postings summarized the new and upcoming R&D activities we had planned for 2011. Now that the year is nearly over, this blog posting presents some of the many R&D accomplishments we completed in 2011.

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By Douglas C. Schmidt
Chief Technology Officer
SEI

As noted in the National Research Council’s report Critical Code: Software Producibility for Defense, mission-critical Department of Defense (DoD) systems increasingly rely on software for their key capabilities. Ironically, it is increasingly hard to motivate investment in long-term software research for the DoD. This lack of investment stems, in part, from the difficulty that acquisitions programs have making a compelling case for the return on these investments in software research. This post explores how the SEI is using the Systems and Software Producibility Collaboration and Experimentation Environment (SPRUCE) to help address this problem.

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By Dionisio de Niz
Senior Member of the Technical Staff,
Research, Technology, and System Solutions

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are characterized by close interactions between software components and physical processes. These interactions can have life-threatening consequences when they include safety-critical functions that are not performed according to their time-sensitive requirements. For example, an airbag must fully inflate within 20 milliseconds (its deadline) of an accident to prevent the driver from hitting the steering wheel with potentially fatal consequences. Unfortunately, the competition of safety-critical requirements with other demands to reduce the cost, power consumption, and device size also create problems, such as automotive recalls, new aircraft delivery delays, and plane accidents. Our research leverages the fact that failing to meet deadlines doesn’t always have the same level of criticality for all functions. For instance, if a music player fails to meet its deadlines the sound quality may be compromised, but lives are not threatened. Systems whose functions have different criticalities are known as mixed criticality systems. This blog posting updates our earlier post to describe the latest results of our research on supporting mixed-criticality operations by giving more central processing unit (CPU) time to functions with higher value while ensuring critical timing guarantees.

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By Dionisio de Niz
Senior Member of the Technical Staff, RTSS

In some key industries, such as defense, automobiles, medical devices, and the smart grid, the bulk of the innovations focus on cyber-physical systems. A key characteristic of cyber-physical systems is the close interaction of software components with physical processes, which impose stringent safety and time/space performance requirements on the systems. This blog post describes research and development we are conducting at the SEI to optimize the performance of cyber-physical systems without compromising their safety.

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