Welcome

Welcome to the Embedded Software Center at University Of Texas at Dallas.

Mission

The Embedded Software Center in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science is an industrial/academic collaborative center for advanced research to dramatically increase the productivity and quality of complex embedded applications.

The center is developing sophisticated tools and techniques for integrating reliable embedded software systems from third party components. The goal is to increase productivity by compressing time-consuming steps in the software development process. Eventually, this will enable domain experts to rapidly assemble an application from existing components using small amounts of in-house software to interface with third party components. The center is also investigating advanced tools to enhance the reliability, security, adaptability, and performance of embedded applications.

To achieve this vision, the center is developing a COTS aware requirements engineering methodology to adapt product concepts in order to maximize the use of existing components and preempt quality problems. A web-based component management system is being developed to automatically track software components, facilitate component customization, and automatically synthesize glue code and design templates. A design methodology is being investigated to provide significant reliability and customizability gains through decomposition of complex monolithic systems into parts that can be independently implemented, validated, and customized. The center is developing tools to support the methodology, including specialized reliability and security enhancement tools and a framework for adapting the system to changes in the environment without sacrificing performance.

The research is being evaluated using prototype development with periodic demonstration projects to assess the technology and measure the productivity and quality gains. The center is working with its industrial partners, currently Alcatel USA and Texas Instruments, for technology transfer and more in-depth demonstration projects.