CNIC: U.S.-Norway Computer Science Project Development on Evolution of Software Product Families in Safety Critical Systems

集成控制和安全系统（icss）是大型软件密集型系统，用于监视和控制加工工厂、石油和天然气生产以及海事设备等领域的安全关键设备和过程。为了利用共性和适应变化，集成集成系统通常作为基于组件的产品族生产，这是开发基于共享资产的软件产品组合的有效策略。马里兰洛约拉大学的首席研究员David Binkley将访问位于奥斯陆的Simula研究实验室的挪威同行，发起一项技术合作调查，以改进软件产品家族的构建和维护。如果成功的话，未来的结果将有利于那些构建软件的人，更广泛地说，有利于那些依赖软件的人。设想中的研究对社会很重要，因为软件的复杂性不断增加，在日常生活中，包括飞机飞行和发电厂运行在内的复杂安全关键系统中，被赋予了越来越大的责任。这项美国-挪威项目开发工作的长期技术目标是构思出新颖的推荐技术，能够通过复杂、安全关键、软件密集型系统家族的发展为工程师提供支持。在此过程中，该项目旨在通过开发增强的工具、技术和最佳实践（例如大型安全关键系统的软件生产指南）来改进工业实践。团队所考虑的最初技术将推广现有的对小规模编程有效的技术。例如，在“小”程序中用于确定涟漪效应的依赖项通常是布尔值。然而，布尔精度是有代价的，因此，新的合作打算用一个更连续的概念来替代，这个概念可以捕获更多不同程度的依赖。通过广泛的传播，未来的结果应该有利于其他的研究人员以及工业社区，在那里改进的工具支持可以帮助减少软件构建的时间和费用，同时提高其质量。

Integrated Control and Safety Systems (ICSSs) are large software-intensive systems that monitor and control safety-critical devices and processes in domains such as process plants, oil and gas production, and maritime equipment. To leverage commonality and accommodate variation, ICSSs are often produced as component-based product families, an effective tactic for developing a portfolio of software products based on shared assets. Principal Investigator, David Binkley of Loyola University Maryland, will visit Norwegian counterparts at the Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo to initiate a collaborative investigation of techniques to improve the construction and maintenance of software product families. If successful, future results should benefit those who construct software and more broadly, those who rely on software. The envisioned research is important to society because software, which is ever increasing in complexity, is being given ever greater responsibility for complex safety-critical systems in daily life, including airplane flight and power plant operation.The long term technical goal of this U.S.-Norwegian project development effort is to conceive novel recommendation technology that can support engineers through the evolution of families of complex, safety-critical, software-intensive systems. In doing so, the project aims to improve industrial practice through developing enhanced tools, techniques, and best practices such as software production guidelines for large safety-critical systems. The initial techniques considered by the team will generalize existing techniques that are effective with programming-in-the-small. For example, the dependences used to determine ripple effects in "small" programs are often Boolean. However, Boolean precision comes at a cost, and thus, the new collaboration intends to pursue replacement with a more continuous notion that captures a more varied level of dependence. Through broad dissemination, future results should benefit other researchers as well as the industrial community, where improved tool support can help to reduce the time and expense of software construction while improving its quality.