ITEA releases technology roadmap on software intensive systems

Edited by Colin Holland, Managing Editor, EuroElectronicsWeb.com and GlobalCommsWeb.com

Information Technology for European Advancement (ITEA) has published a white paper to strengthen European software intensive systems. It shows how ITEA hopes to build co-operation between industry research and academic institutes.

The 140-page document describes a futuristic vision for embedded software, and related software technologies. ITEA elaborates on three major application domains: home, enterprise and mobile use. Two further domains are also explored: intermediation services and infrastructures as well as systems engineering.

A software intensive system is a term that describes groups of products and components that are controlled by, and interact with the world, through software. The software is embedded within the electronics of each product as firmware as read only memory (ROM), or programmable ROMs (PROMS).

ITEA believes its roadmap will become a memorandum of understanding and a baseline for the future development of software intensive systems for European industry. It presents an overview of developments and challenges for software intensive systems – from timely production to quality control and from standardisation to networking.

The paper identifies options for cross-industry development in common platforms and will help to raise overall productivity.

Paul Mehring, ITEA Chairman, said: "The Technology Roadmap for software intensive systems underpins ITEA’s philosophy that an industry-driven multinational strategic programme is effective and is rewarded with increased European competitiveness".

"During the road-mapping process, about 120 technologies have been addressed as common technologies for the application scenarios, which show that our technological environment will become more networked, more autonomous and increasingly self-organising. Appliances will ‘play’ together, embedded software agents, which will co-ordinate our calendars and travel plans, will make technology safe and user-friendly. Data content volume will rise faster than bandwidth capacity transporting it. Therefore, there will be increasing need for new compression algorithms, such as MPEG 4. Networks will link us, ad-hoc, to world-wide information systems like the internet," said Mehring.