SENSATION: Self Energy-Supporting Autonomous Computation

SENSATION: Self Energy-Supporting Autonomous Computation

Funded by: European Commission FP7
Duration: October 2012 until November 2015
Contact: prof.dr. J.C. van de Pol

Summary of the project

SENSATION aims at increasing the scale of systems that are self-supporting by balancing energy harvesting and consumption up to the level of complete products. In order to build such Energy Centric Systems, embedded system designers face the quest for optimal performance within acceptable reliability and tight energy bounds. Programming systems that reconfigure themselves in view of changing tasks, resources, errors and available energy is a demanding challenge.

The lack of effective design-time support for taking on this challenge obstructs the creativity and productivity of design teams. This is an impediment to European companies developing embedded components, devices, and platforms, and is a major obstacle to developing self-supporting systems.

SENSATION will free the system design process by devising energy-centric modeling and optimization tools for the design of resource-optimal reliable systems. This depends on orchestrated, non-incremental progress in several research domains. The project combines Europe's leading scientists in model-based quantitative evaluation and optimization, and in low-power reconfigurable systems.

SENSATION provides automated analysis and synthesis tools for energy-centric systems. For the first time, tools for optimizing performance and reliability will be integrated with energy analysis. Based on efficient model-checking algorithms and massive design space exploration, this leads to a many-fold increase in system design productivity.

Three industrial partners, GomSpace, Recore Systems, and STMicroelectronics provide challenging case studies and serve as industrial testbeds. The yardstick for the impact of SENSATION is a reduction in energy consumption by 50% and a reduction in time-to-market of at least 10%. Two European institutes specializing in embedded systems, ESI and CISS, actively contribute to the development of the technology and its effective dissemination and industrial adoption.

PARTNERS:

  • University of Aalborg (CISS) (Coordinator)
  • RWTH Aachen
  • Embedded Systems Institute (Eindhoven)
  • Inria (Grenoble and Rennes)
  • University of Saarland (Saarbrücken)
  • University of Twente
  • GomSpace Aps
  • Recore Systems
  • STMicroelectronics