CMG, Océ and Delft University design embedded software
Amstelveen, The Netherlands, Thursday, July 11, 2002
SENTER, the subsidy agency of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, has granted almost €1.4 million to three participants in a European partnership project for the design of new development methods for embedded software.
CMG, Océ and Delft University of Technology will receive the subsidy for their work on the MOOSE project, which aims to improve and optimise the development of embedded software. Besides CMG, Océ and the TU Delft, ASML and Philips will also participate in the Dutch part of MOOSE. The total investment in the project amounts to over €20 million.
The MOOSE project - officially named 'Software Engineering Methodologies for Embedded Systems' - will design new development methods for optimising the integration and coordination of the various parts of embedded software projects. The fact that the project is part of the ITEA programme underscores its importance for Europe. ITEA, in turn, is part of Eureka, an innovation programme to strengthen and support market-oriented industrial R&D in Europe. The MOOSE project is expected to involve over 100 man years of work.
Embedded software - applied in mobile phones, printing systems, household appliances, medical equipment, chip production systems, consumer electronics etc. - has played an increasingly stronger role in recent years and will continue to do so. However, the shortage of specialists, the high development costs and the often extremely short time-to-market are making it difficult to meet all the demands with the current methods.
Specific methods will make it easier to define standards and tools to coordinate the various development stages and significantly increase the productivity of developers. Standard methods are already applied in the mainstream software industry, but they are not yet sufficiently attuned to the high demands of the embedded software industry.
"Good standard methods for the development of embedded software will enable the product and project goals to be realised more effectively at lower costs," says Rini van Solingen, Principal Consultant at CMG. "The project is organised so that the knowledge and requirements in embedded software technologies are inventoried and stored and made suitable for different businesses. This will improve the competitiveness of European countries and give an extra boost to the European embedded software industry."
In the MOOSE project a specialised framework will be developed which will define all the activities in requirements engineering, architectural analysis and design, implementation and improvements to tests, products and processes. This is the first time that an initiative has been launched for the full integration of the different development phases of embedded software.
The MOOSE project began in March 2002 and will continue until the spring of 2004. The project is part of an international partnership which also has partners in Finland (Nokia, VTT, the University of Oulu and Solid) and Spain (Datapixel, ESI, SQS en TeamArteche).
Source: CMG, http://www.cmg.nl/
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