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，用于监测和控制加工厂、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。为了利用通用性和适应变化，ICSS通常作为基于组件的产品系列生产，这是基于共享资产开发软件产品组合的有效策略。 首席研究员，马里兰州洛约拉大学的大卫宾克利，将访问挪威同行在模拟研究实验室在奥斯陆启动技术的合作调查，以改善软件产品系列的建设和维护。 如果成功的话，未来的结果应该有利于那些构建软件的人，更广泛地说，那些依赖软件的人。 这一设想的研究对社会非常重要，因为软件的复杂性不断增加，在日常生活中对复杂的安全关键系统（包括飞机飞行和发电厂运行）的责任也越来越大。挪威的项目开发工作是构思新的推荐技术，可以支持工程师通过复杂的，安全关键的，软件密集型系统的家庭的演变。 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（如大型安全关键系统的软件生产指南）来改善工业实践。 团队考虑的初始技术将概括现有的对小规模编程有效的技术。 例如，用于确定“小”程序中的涟漪效应的依赖关系通常是布尔型的。 然而，布尔精确性是有代价的，因此，新的合作旨在用一个更连续的概念来替代，这个概念可以捕捉到更多样化的依赖程度。 通过广泛的传播，未来的研究结果应该有利于其他研究人员以及工业界，其中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.