2010 Oct 24
Thanks to $10.5 million in funding from Automotive Partnership Canada, and $6.1 million from industry partners General Motors of Canada Ltd, IBM Canada, and Malina Software Corp, CS professor Jo Atlee and her newly announced national research network can now begin their five-year mission to tackle the technological challenges related to the growing complexity of automotive software systems.
With eighteen years of research and teaching experience here at Waterloo, Atlee will be co-leading the Network on Engineering Complex Software Intensive Systems for Automotive Systems (NECSIS) with McMaster University’s Tom Maibaum, Canada Research Chair in the Foundations of Software Engineering. Other universities in the network include McGill University, Queen’s University, University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, University of Victoria and the Centre de Recherche Informatique de Montréal.
NECSIS will focus on the advancement of an emerging methodology called model driven engineering (MDE). MDE reduces the complexity of developing software by focusing on models and their relationships, reflected in the designs, code and documents that developers work with, enabling them to test and verify models even before the code exists.
“The idea of a network of researchers working on model-based software engineering has been brewing for a number of years,” explains Atlee, “but there were few software companies that practiced this style of software development and therefore we had few models of real-world software to work with. That has changed in the last few years. The automotive domain is now the key adopter and driver of this new paradigm of software development. ”
“Computer systems in vehicles are managing more and more operations and increasing in complexity,’ said Maibaum. “That adds up to tens of millions of lines of software code that must work flawlessly and seamlessly together, and achieving this is becoming increasingly challenging using current approaches to software development.”
Kevin Williams, president and managing director of GM of Canada agrees and sees NECSIS as a “key initiative as we re-think the automobile and deploy innovative approaches to develop tomorrow’s technologies.”
“Canada has long led the world in the highly advanced field of model driven engineering,” adds Bran Selic, President and Founder of Malina Software Corp, a software company with decades of MDE experience.
Like GM of Canada and Melina Software Corp, IBM is “proud to leverage our Canadian research capabilities to invest and to collaborate in this innovation effort as we collectively advance intelligent transportation in Canada,” says Bruce Ross, president, IBM Canada adding that now is the time to make it happen.
“In an era where billions of devices are being interconnected to enable intelligent decisions, the time is right to create and to innovate development processes using real-time navigational capabilities that will help build a smarter car.”
This uniquely collaborative network will be based in the new McMaster Automotive Resource Centre (MARC) being developed at McMaster Innovation Park. It is the same facility that will house research initiatives related to new hybrid powertrain and lightweight materials. MARC is being developed as an innovation ecosystem, promoting daily interactions among industry, university and government on market-oriented and industry-driven research.
“As one of the network team members said, ‘this is the best research project that I've ever been involved with; both with respect to the research being proposed and the ‘dream team’ of researchers and engineers that we've put together',” explains Atlee.
When this dream team gets going expect even more collaboration not only from them but also from all the university students studying software engineering at the network universities.
Waterloo students “will have frequent interactions and collaborations with their counterparts throughout their studies including opportunities for lab visits, student exchanges, and internships at the companies.”
Student collaboration will allow them to not only “see how their work fits into the much larger research context, they will see how it fits into the context of real-world software development. They will also develop large support networks of colleagues throughout the NECSIS network, and these social networks will help them throughout their careers.”
Atlee and her team can’t wait for all this to begin. “I'm very excited that this project has been recognized and funded, and I'm keen to get started. We all are.”
Congratulations Jo!
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Tel: 519-888-4567 x33293
Fax: 519-885-1208
Contact | Feedback: newseditor@cs.uwaterloo.ca | David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science | Faculty of Mathematics
Last modified: Friday, 29-Oct-2010 16:10:53 EDT
