ECSEL JU Project AMASS

Electronic systems are now so ubiquitous that their dependable operation is vital. Embedded systems have significantly increased in technical complexity towards open, interconnected systems, which has exacerbated the problem of ensuring dependability in the presence of human, environmental and technological risks, making product certification a costly excersise. AMASS’ ultimate aim is to lower the cost of certification in face of rapidly changing product features and market needs.

The rise of complex Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has led to many initiatives to promote reuse and automation of labour intensive activities. Two large-scale projects are OPENCOSS and SafeCer, which deal with assurance and certification of software-intensive critical systems using incremental and model-based approaches.

OPENCOSS has defined a Common Certification Language (CCL), unifying concepts from different industries to build a harmonized approach to reduce time and cost overheads, via facilitating the reuse of certification assets.

SafeCer developed safety-oriented process lines, a component model, contract-based verification techniques, and process/product-based model-driven safety certification for compositional development and certification of CPSs.

AMASS will create and consolidate a European-wide assurance and certification open tool platform, ecosystem and self-sustainable community spanning the largest CPS vertical markets, by combining and evolving the OPENCOSS and SafeCer technological solutions towards end-user validated tools. AMASS will also perform further research into new areas not covered by those projects.

AMASS’ aim will be achieved by establishing a novel, holistic and reuse-oriented approach for architecture-driven assurance (fully compatible with standards such as AUTOSAR and IMA), multi-concern assurance (compliance demonstration, impact analyses, and compositional assurance of security and safety aspects), and for seamless interoperability between assurance/certification and engineering activities along with third-party actions (external assessments, supplier assurance).