The SEI seeks collaborative research with organizations applying predictive modeling techniques to operational quality attributes such as performance, security, reliability, and safety criticality in real-time and embedded systems. The techniques are part of a model-based approach to software engineering and include the use of models for predicting system behavior and improving system performance before code is written.

System of Systems Software Assurance

We aim to provide an integrated set of methods and practices for developing justified confidence in the acceptability of system-of-systems behavior under all field and usage conditions. Our focus is large-scale, multi-user, adaptive information management and command and control (C2) systems of systems. Our research areas include the following:

• Interoperability Assurance: System-of-systems constituents must be able to exchange information—that is, to interoperate—to support a desired system-of-systems capability. So, interoperability assurance is a key aspect of system-of-systems  assurance. Through this research, we intend to determine how to make systems of systems more robust against the consequences of failure to exchange information properly among system-of-systems constituents.
• Release Decision Analysis: Combining assurance information collected from various sources and phases of development can contribute to improvements in the soundness and timeliness of system-of-systems release decisions. We will determine how a variety of design, analysis, and test information can be combined to develop increased and justified confidence in system-of-systems behavior.
• Compositional Robustness Evaluation: We will seek to identify and exploit novel ways of predicting and bounding unacceptable system-of-systems behavior. For example, can non-monotonic logic frameworks or the development of robustness guards limit the scope of unacceptable end-to-end system interactions?
• Transition and Collaboration Analysis: We seek to understand barriers and incentives for transitioning new assurance technology into practice. Initially, we are focusing on identifying organizational interactions supporting the development and adoption of assurance technology in the security assurance domain. We will use this overview of assurance technology developers and users to help determine the most effective transition paths for technology developed by the other research thrusts.

One of the methods we are exploiting in our research into system-of-systems software assurance is the assurance case. We seek collaborators in our work to develop the use of this method to form sound conclusions about system-of-systems safety, security, and reliability.

Fault Containment

The SEI seeks partners to pilot approaches for discovering why system-level failures still occur despite the use of fault tolerance techniques and fault containment strategies. The SEI has identified system-wide design rules that must be satisfied to limit propagation of seemingly minor faults throughout a system. The SEI has also developed a formalized analysis framework for system fault containment and stability management.

Advanced Processor Performance

The SEI is developing engineering-based solutions to make efficient use of advanced processor hardware architectures without sacrificing predictable execution times. The SEI model-based engineering team is seeking organizations to pilot approaches to reducing worst-case execution time and avoiding execution time variation due to cache/pipeline.