Download Brochures
For more information about our projects,
please download the following documents:
R&D Brochure 2010 0.6Mb
Projects
By strongly investing in R&D we recognize its importance in the process of bringing new technologies, products and processes to the market, as well as for incorporating innovation into our customer’s projects.
Such investment has already brought successful and innovative products and technologies to the market. A few illustrative R&D projects where Critical is or has been involved are:
EMMON
EMMON Project is a collaborative venture within the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission. EMMON will evolve through a partnership between Critical Software Technologies and eight other organisations, both corporate and academic: Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Intesys, Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Tecnicas de Gipuzkoa, Critical Software S.A., Trinity College Dublin, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, SESM S.c.a.r.l., Akting Ingeniaritza S.L.
EMMON intends to develop a functional prototype for the real-time monitoring of specific natural scenarios (related to the quality of urban life, forest environment, civil protection etc) using Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) devices. The project will provide the technology to effectively monitor and control an area of 50 square km - this will involve the deployment of thousands of wireless sensor nodes which will be a massive advance on the current state-of-the-art.
SHARE
SHARE project aims to support the sharing of knowledge (sw evaluations, benchmarks, methodologies...) and software code in the Embedded System Domain in a way that assures easy collaboration of the stakeholders. It is a collaborative venture within the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission. SHARE will evolve through a partnership between Critical Software Technologies and seven other organisations, both corporate and academic: SESM S.c.a.r.l., CRIAI – Consorzio Campano di Ricerca per l’Informatica e l’Automazione Industriale, SIEMENS - IT Solutions & Services, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Università di Bologna, CIAOTECH Srl, ST MICROELECTRONICS.
DEPLOY
The focus of the DEPLOY project is on the exploitation of formal methods and understanding how the current state-of-the-art in this domain can be effectively used in the development of dependable systems. Event-B is the formal method language that has been selected.
V&V Management
We are looking at ways of providing a complete V&V solution to aid the whole process of V&V from code scrutiny to module testing. Its aim is to reduce the documentation burden from testers, increase consistency and accuracy of work and aid the day-to-day project management of larger projects.
The primary customer will initially be internal but as the project progresses and becomes more mature we hope to make it available for external use. Current estimates are that 10%-15% of project costs can be saved through this approach.
SysML/ Safety / Model Driven Design
A discipline that is rarely incorporated into the design and often only considered towards the end of a project is the consideration of failures and their effects. Failure management has been seen as discipline that lives in its own space and through a list of techniques aims at reducing the risk of failure in a system to as low as practical.
There are two main approaches to failure analysis; FMEA which is a component based bottom up approach and FTA which is a top down system level failure approach. Although FMEA is tabular and FTA is graphical, analysis has been conducted which suggests that it is not unreasonable to combine these two approaches to form a single reliability matrix.
When failure considerations are made later in the development process it takes considerably more effort to retrospectively accommodate these into the design. Therefore for Safety Critical systems where safety/reliability is paramount, considerations to minimise any failures which can lead to these should be made as early as possible in the project. As SysML is the standard system modelling language, a means to integrate failure analysis would give us a System modelling language for safety management.
The issue is that data sources and tools used for Safety Management are not integrated with data sources and tools used for Systems Engineering. The end result is that overall the costs of development are high, timescales increase and it becomes more difficult to gather evidence required to build a safety argument.
At Critical we are looking at different ways of providing an integrated and standards-based design environment to assist the analysis, recording and documentation of safety engineering artefacts.
