Scientific publications

Electronic passports, or e-passports for short, contain a contactless smartcard which stores digitally signed data. To rigorously test e-passports, we developed formal models of the e-passport protocols that enable model-based testing using the TorXakis framework.

The three technical universities in the Netherlands (Eindhoven University of Technology, Delft University of Technology and University of Twente), abbreviated as 3TU, started a joint master on Embedded Systems in 2006. Embedded Systems is an interdisciplinary area of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mathematics.

This chapter argues that embedded systems design faces several challenges of which late integration and the difference in development productivity between disciplines are major ones. Model driven engineeringMDE) looks a promising approach to address these challenges. However, MDE is a new approach which has to be defined and implemented in close interaction by academia and industry the near future.

The growing complexity and size of systems and the organizations that create these systems trigger the need for instruments that facilitate the creation of these systems. We shortly analyze these trends and the (potential) role of reference architectures as facilitating means. After a short discussion about the content of Reference Architectures and their relation with system architectures, system design and actual systems, we zoom in on the question what the appropriate level of detail is for Reference Architectures.

We describe an approach to support UML-based development of embedded systems by formal techniques. A subset of UML is extended with timing annotations and given a formal semantics. UML models are translated, via XMI, to the input format of formal tools, to allow timed and non-timed model checking and interactive theorem proving.

The way in which a system's software archive is partitioned influences the evolvability of that system. The partition of a software archive, e.g. subsystem decomposition, is mostly assessed by looking at the static (include, call) relations between the parts. In the literature history information is also taken into account to assess the partition.

Nowadays, designers resort to abstraction techniques to conquer the complexity of industrial embedded systems during the design process. However, due to the large semantic gap between the abstractions and the implementation, the designers often fails to apply the abstraction techniques. In this paper, an EIS-based (executable interface specification) approach is proposed for the embedded system design.

In this paper, we present a dynamic analysis approach to increase the understandability of a large softwareintensive system, more particularly to enable the identification of dependencies between its execution entities. This approach analyzes the execution of a software system in a top-down fashion to cope with complexity and uses execution entities such as scenarios, components, and processes rather than code artifacts such as modules, classes, or objects.