Autonomous and Critical Embedded Systems

Themes

The research topics of the ACES team revolve around concurrent systems in general, for which non-functional properties such as performance or security have to be ensured. These may be systems running in parallel on the same unicorn processor, enforcing timing properties as in real-time embedded systems. They may also consist of distributed systems running on different processors and competitively accessing shared resources in a consistent manner. Similarly, this concurrency can occur in secure systems for which the attacker and the defender act in competition. To cover the entire continuum of concurrent systems, the ACES team chose to structure its activities around two themes: loosely coupled systems and strongly coupled systems. It should be noted however that this separation remains soft. As a consequence, the activities of the different team members overlap and complement each other greatly. For example, the critical architectures in the transport domain (mostly categorised as strongly coupled systems) tend to open up to external services — less safe, but more adaptive (mostly categorised as loosely coupled systems).