ASSUME

Project results

In a nutshell, ASSUME’s main goal was to enable the affordable, standard-compliant development and verification of highly automated, safety-relevant and performance-critical mobility systems. A strong focus on development methods for concurrent systems and static verification techniques allows for the cost-effective proof of the absence of problems, even in a multi-core environment. The major field of innovation for the project’s industrial partners (end-users) was model-based parallel software engineering for multi- and many-core processors. By improving their existing tools and developing new ones, ASSUME ultimately enabled the effective use of formal verification and synthesis technology along the design flow.

Exploitation

The ASSUME partners have seen successes in terms of technical output, commercial results and ongoing collaboration. Bosch, for example, worked with several ASSUME partners to develop new methods and tools for the sequential verification of very large embedded software. Through several Bosch use-cases, these lead to a threefold decrease in the time taken for verification, a reduction of the memory footprint by a factor of three and a reduction of the number of false warnings by a factor of up to ten. BTC ES, MES, Daimler and OFFIS set up a collaborative toolchain for model-based, requirement-driven development which integrates the industrial tools of BTC ES and MES with an OFFIS research prototype. In an industrial use-case provided by Daimler, it has been shown that this can reduce the effort for safety verification while improving requirement traceability.
The main activities of the Swedish consortium were focused on allowing seamless traceability and impact analysis of functional and safety properties for Scania’s development environments alongside SME FindOut. The collaborations initiated in the project are still running at several levels. A KTH senior researcher for instance, has been working part-time as an external consultant for Scania’s R&D team on technologies initially developed within ASSUME – a great example of knowledge transfers from academia to industry.
Cross-academic links also had a crucial role to play in ASSUME. For example, Sorbonne Université and École Normale Supérieure developed new models and abstractions that account for the weak consistency memories of multicore systems, the detection of deadlocks and the real-time scheduling policies used in multicore embedded software systems. This produced both theoretical results and proof-of-concept implementations.
ASSUME made TU/e aware of both the importance and the costs of fault-resistance, especially in the automotive domain and for space-critical operations. The developed advanced analysis techniques have been consolidated into the publicly-available SDF3 (SDF For Free) toolset and the open-source tool LSAT and have been used in collaboration with ASSUME and other partners.
Thanks to newly developed or improved tools, ASSUME enabled KoçSistem to open up a commercial revenue stream with Ford Otosan, and start a new, local R&D project based on automotive manufacturing processes and two additional ITEA projects, XIVT and PANORAMA.

Around 700 developers currently use one or more tools developed in ASSUME and this number is set to grow, helping society as a whole to make a smooth transition to mobility which is sustainable, affordable and inclusive for all.