Efficient Safety for Products (ESPRESSO)

The automotive industry is going through a technological paradigm shift in which moderately complex ―standalone‖ mechatronic vehicles are being changed to incorporate extended collaborative functionalities enabled by software and networking within and beyond the vehicle itself. Experiences from other domains demonstrate that current development practices are not able to cost-efficiently deal with the increasing number of functionalities fitted into embedded and mechatronic systems.

New methods, techniques and tools are needed for dealing with the increasing system complexity in such a way that system development, maintenance, and safety standard compliance become practically feasible, i.e. effective and efficient.

The ESPRESSO project has the overall objective to develop and adapt model-based techniques that improve the quality and reduce the cost for development of embedded systems in trucks, and especially safety critical systems.

The main technical results from the project will be

- a modeling and analysis methodology that supports reasoning about the system robustness and reliability, safety analysis and verification..

- guidelines and tool recommendations for industrial adoption of a model-based approach to engineering, tailored to the needs of truck embedded systems.

- a definition of one or more industrial systems and results from case studies where example systems have been used to apply and evaluate the developed concepts.

The results of the project are expected to result in changed work practices at Scania, competence development for participating persons and organizations including one educated PhD, an enhanced network between Scania and KTH, publications including reports, research papers and one doctoral thesis, and in a new course at KTH.

All goals will be tackled both from an industrial and academic point of view in order to assess useful techniques and improvement potential. The highlighted goals are receiving a lot of attention in the aerospace and automotive sectors. Much fewer efforts have however studied these problems in the context of trucks. Compared to passenger cars and aerospace machines, trucks are facing additional challenges since they are subject to further systems integration and have a longer life time during which they evolve. Gathered state of the art approaches will be assessed against the particular needs for truck embedded systems.

ESPRESSO is a collaborative project between Scania and KTH, with Scania as applicant and project leader. The project team will consist of industrial engineers, one PhD student and senior KTH researchers. A common case study will be used as one important means for interaction in the project. Four workshops per year are included in the project plan including project internal, open as well as workshops in conjunction with other organizations/projects.

The project will contribute to the FFI Fordonsutveckling program target by addressing the challenges of dealing with the increasing embedded systems complexity, thus paving way for new functionalities for active safety, emission reduction and efficient transportation.