OBJECTIVES

The general goal of the Twins project is to design, implement and trial better HW/SW engineering and management methods, techniques and tools. This goal is achieved addressing the following sub-goals:

The sub-goals of the project are:

This might also benefit the standardization of platforms and help to alleviate performance and quality problems.

  1. To improve requirements co-specification and allocation – by customizing existing methods, tools and techniques for requirements specification and verification and developing additional functionalities to enable:
    • HW/SW systems requirements co-specification and deriving sound requirements (if possibly formulated as (semi) formal requirements) out of the textual requirements.
    • Testing from requirements to component based architectures.
    • Deriving models out of the requirements including the desired properties, e.g., Matlab models.
    • Verification of the requirements, by applying the models.
    • SW/HW allocation decisions.
  2. To co-optimize HW/SW architectures – by focusing on simulation and emulation of physical behaviour of electronics systems (concerns mechanics as well as physics and electronics).
  3. To improve the life cycle management and configuration management of evolving products and components (hardware or software) by
    • Defining the dependencies between standard components and combining models
    • Determining challenges and solutions needed for controlling design flow and managing product-related data in co-design environment
  4. To improve testing of multidisciplinary products – by adapting advanced techniques for the automatic generation of test inputs and oracles to the tools and formalisms used for requirements specification and model derivation. In order for faults to be detected as early as possible, tests will be run by simulation and software models of hardware components (e.g., System C)will be tested

The results of Twins should help to improve the competition of the European industry – by providing them with a platform to design faster and more effectively their new, higher quality electronic products.