CHARTER: Critical and High Assurance Requirements Transformed through Engineering Rigour

Funded by: ARTEMIS Embedded Computing Systems Initiative
Duration: April 2009 until March 2012
Contact: prof.dr.ir. A. Rensink

Summary of the project

CHARTER is developing concepts, methods, and tools for embedded system design and deployment that will enable developers to master the complexity and substantially improve the development, verification and certification of critical embedded systems.

CHARTER will ease, accelerate, and reduce the cost of the certification of critical embedded systems by melding realtime Java technology, Model Driven Development, rule-based compilation, and formal verification.  Enabling technologies include the KeY tool and JML, as well as the deterministic garbage collection of the JamaicaVM and the UML development suite Artisan Studio. These provide the basis for pushing the boundaries of realtime system development and certification.  This approach, Quality Embedded Development (QED), will push software certification to a new level and thereby significantly contribute to the safety and security of the upcoming age of an embedded software society.

Contribution to SRA
Critical embedded software systems assist, accelerate, and control various aspects of society and are common in cars, aircraft, medical instruments and major industrial and utility plants. These systems are critical to human life and must be held to the highest standards of performance through formal certification procedures. Human life will increasingly depend on embedded software and to protect our society from the resulting severe risks, ever more software will be subject to governmental regulations and require verification. The costly and time-consuming procedures employed today to verify new software will be unable to meet future formal verification demands. The CHARTER project technologies will enable new methods of verification and certification that will streamline the process for certification of crucial embedded systems through the use of higher level languages and Model Driven Development methods and tools.

Market Innovation and Impact
CHARTER will improve productivity of embedded systems developers by making it practical to use high level language technology, including object-oriented languages and automatic memory management, in high assurance and safety-critical embedded systems. High level languages provide a richer and more advanced development environment that speeds the design and development process while allowing application developers to use and adapt existing code more easily and in less time. These benefits have yet to be realised for critical applications in the Aviation, Medical, Automotive, and Surveillance markets due to stringent and complex requirements for certification. CHARTER technologies will enable companies relying on safety critical embedded systems for their products to be more competitive through reduced cost and shorter time to market. Costs of recertification for product releases will also be reduced making companies more agile and competitive.

R&D Innovation and Technical Excellence
Advanced requirements engineering processes will be developed to address deductive formal verification and requirements driven test generation that will streamline regulatory compliant verification and certification procedures. Hyperlinked traceability evidence containing baseline artefacts, their certification evidence, including verification traces, and their traceability relationships will be provided.

Extra functional properties of critical embedded systems that are an essential part of verification will be addressed through Automatic Test Case Generation methods, while a lightweight, portable, repository independent graph rewriting tool that is retargetable to different languages and metamodels will be developed. These innovations will be the basis of new technology for certification of model-driven development that translates partial models to more complete models, models to source code, and source code to binary code, complemented by Rule Driven Compilation techniques that are able to demonstrate the correctness of the code.

Together these technologies will be assembled in a complete tool chain and methodology for safety critical software development that will reduce design costs, shorten the overall design cycle, leverage pre-existing tools, and help manage project complexity by providing developers with more powerful tools.

Project Partners
aicas GmbH - Germany
Atego Ltd - United Kingdom
Chalmers University of Technology - Sweden
Impronova AB - Sweden
Lero at Dundalk Institute of Technology - Ireland
Luminis - Netherlands
NLR - Netherlands
QRTECH AB - Sweden
Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen - Netherlands
The Open Group - United Kingdom
Universiteit Twente - Netherlands

About ARTEMIS Embedded Computing Systems Initiative
Computing technology is facing many threats and challenges from fragmentation, globalisation and fierce competition. The European Union recognises the strategic importance of Embedded Computing Systems and has launched the Artemis Joint Technology Initiative (JTI). The ARTEMIS JTI is implemented as a Joint Undertaking (JU) which is a public-private partnership between:

• The European Commission
• Member States
• ARTEMISIA, a non-profit Industrial Association

ARTEMISIA is the ARTEMIS Industrial Association which represents the research commmunity including Industry (large, small and medium sized companies), universities and research institutes. The ARTEMIS JU is an organisation based in Brussels.

ARTEMIS aims to tackle the research and structural challenges faced by the industrial sector. The objective is to define and implement a Research Agenda for Embedded Computing System through a 10-year €2.5 billion research programme. ARTEMIS aims to help European industry consolidate and reinforce its world leadership in embedded computing technologies. The economic impact in terms of jobs and growth is expected to exceed €100 billion over ten years.