26 June 2008
Customising safety critical code
A researcher at the University of Southampton has won a £300,000 grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to improve the safety and usability of automatically generated software code, commonly used in the space and automotive industries.
Dr Bernd Fischer,pictured, from the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, will develop systematic techniques and supporting tools that will allow application developers to customise automatically generated code efficiently and reliably without needing to modify either the code generator or the generated code.
“This research is about making changes to the output of code generators,” said Dr Fischer. “It’s about making the code generator more flexible without having to go into the inner guts of the machine. Users in safety critical application domains, such as automotive and avionics, will benefit from the assurance support we can provide for customisations.”
According to Dr Fischer, software developers generally rely on code generation as a key technology to translate high level models into code. Although this speeds development and increases productivity and reliability, the output code often differs from the user’s exact requirements and thus needs customisation.
Author
Graham Pitcher
Supporting Information
Websites
http://ecs.soton.ac.uk
Companies
University of Southampton
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