Position statement:

Up to now, products and design processes are specific to industrial segments reflecting their requirements, ecosystems and customer profiles. Consumer electronics, mobile communication, automotive, avionics, medical or industrial applications are good examples. This is rapidly changing. Cars are communicating and host internet applications, medical applications are entering mobile devices and the smart home, and production lines exploit the internet for global optimization. Many products and services no longer serve individual needs but become part of a network that addresses larger societal challenges, such as smart cities, energy supply, mobility and transport, future healthcare, or the aging society. Such trends are predicted in many roadmaps, such as in the ARTEMIS or ECSEL roadmaps. These trends impact public funding, such as Horizon 2020, or, to name an important Swiss example, nano-tera.ch.

This development has a fundamental impact on system design. Design processes will overarch individual applications, products and local networks requiring design process integration for multipurpose networks of embedded systems. These networked systems will become distributed integration platforms requiring appropriate software architectures and communication. We already observe such trends in automotive electronics (AUTOSAR) or avionics (Distributed Modular Electronics), but these architectures are still local and not yet ready for open networks and platforms with many owners. Designs and design processes must become interoperable to target global requirements of performance, safety, dependability, energy consumption, security and, not the least, cost efficiency. Hardware and communication systems must support distributed run-time environments, rather than single application domains thereby handling combinations of critical and non-critical applications (mixed critical systems).

Open networks with many owners will have an especially strong impact on design. The usual lab based design process with thorough verification and test, as found today, will not easily scale to open networks that are never down and integrate many different applications. For such applications, part of the design process could be moved to the field with major implications on both the design processes and the design artefacts. We may expect changes in design goals moving from feature richness and performance towards robustness, predictability, and dependability, in order to control the emerging complex systems.

Science is answering the upcoming requirements with the new areas of networked embedded systems (ARTEMIS Roadmap: “The Neural Network of Society”), cyberphysical systems and the Internet of Things.  However, we are still at the beginning and only start to find models and methods for such design processes and complex systems-of-systems. 
 

About the panel member:

Rolf Ernst received a diploma in computer science and a Dr.-Ing. (with honors) in electrical engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, in 81 and 87. From 88 to 89, he was a Member of Technical Staff in the Computer Aided Design & Test Laboratory at Bell Laboratories, Allentown, PA. Since 90, he has been a professor of electrical engineering at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, where he chairs a university institute of 65 researchers and staff. He was Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering from 1999 to 2001.

His research activities include embedded system design and design automation. The activities are or have been supported by the German "Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft" (corresponds to the NSF), by the German BMBF and BMWi, by the European Union, and by industrial contracts, such as from Bosch, Daimler, EADS, GM, IAV, Intel, Ford, Thales, Toyota, or Volkswagen. He gave numerous keynotes, invited presentations and tutorials at major international events and contributed to seminars and summer schools in the areas of hardware/software co-design, embedded system architectures, and system modeling and verification. Symtavision, a spin-off from his group, has commercialized the performance analysis and optimization tool, SymTA/S, which is widely used by automotive and other companies throughout the world.
He chaired major international events, such as the International Conference on Computer Aided Design of VLSI (ICCAD), EMSOFT, CODES+ISSS, ECRTS, or the Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference and Exhibition, and was Chair of the European Design Automation Association (EDAA), which is the main sponsor of DATE. He is a founding member of the ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded System Design (SIGBED), and was a member of the first board of directors. For more than 13 years, he served in many functions of the German DFG (corresponds to NSF), as an elected member (Fachkollegiat) and Deputy Spokesperson of the "Computer Science" review board, and as a member of the member of the DFG Senat Committee for Collaborative Research Centers. He is an advisor to the German Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) and member of the board of its high-tech entrepreneurship program EXIST.

He is an IEEE Fellow, a DATE Fellow, and served as an ACM-SIGDA Distinguished Lecturer. He is a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering, acatech. He received the EDAA Lifetime Achievement Award 2014.