Partners

Industrial Partners

Successful deployment of advanced engineering methods in industry, which is the ultimate goal of DEPLOY, can only be achieved if it can be demonstrated that industrial business units will eventually use this approach in the development of actual products. Therefore the industrial side of the consortium consists of companies who have long recognised the benefits of formal methods and who are prepared to take the necessary steps to implement. We have five industrial partners in DEPLOY, comprising of two groups.

Embedded System Group

For obvious reasons, real applications of formal methods in industry are often devoted to the development of embedded systems, wherein safety and fault tolerance play an important role. This is why three companies working in this domain have been chosen:

• Bosch has a long history in the development of car systems, where their engineers have a long established reputation for excellence. They recognize the importance of, and benefits to be gained from Formal Methods especially since production revolves around closely related but nevertheless slightly different systems for a number of car manufacturers.

• Siemens Transportation Systems has been a pioneer in formal methods used in the construction of completely automatic train systems including the driverless line 14 of the Parisian Metro and, more recently, the Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport shuttle. The safety-critical parts of these systems have been developed using B (this resulted in more than 40,000 formal proofs in each case). Siemens is interested in further developing the use of formal methods in the upper part of their product life cycle: requirement analysis and system architecture.

• Space Systems Finland is a Finnish SME, a leading developer of space applications software. They also have experience in using advanced engineering methods in developing real products and a large number of their engineers were educated to a high level in this domain and are ready, willing and able to engage in deployment of these methods.

Non-embedded Systems Group

It was crucial for the project to incorporate two other industrial partners, not involved in the development of embedded systems, to allow us to ensure successful deployment of advanced engineering methods in the two rapidly growing sectors. This diversification is an important factor in the success of DEPLOY. Clearly, although formal methods have been used extensively in certain niches, one has to see whether they can be used in other industrial fields:

• Although SAP is a newcomer in this domain, they are extremely interested in determining whether formal methods can be used in the construction of business systems. SAP recognises that the field of security (as treated by formal methods) is a domain in which they have a role to play as the products they sell are used in security related contexts.