South-East European Research Centre (SEERC)

Software is more and more responsible for most of the innovations of products. Particularly in the automotive sector, the share of embedded software has been dramatically increasing in the past years. 80-90% of innovations there are related to electronics, and companies need to undertake considerable qualification efforts in order to cope with the growing demand for embedded software development. The number of concurrent software systems and Embedded Computational Units (ECUs) in cars is constantly growing from 10-15 ECU in 1995 to nearly 100 ECU in 2007. In 2010 the number of lines of code in an average car is expected to exceed 100 Millions.

The engineering of embedded systems is no longer based on classical hardware engineering but on software systems engineering. With a rising level of abstraction necessary to handle such complex systems of hardware and software, model-based technologies have been developed in the last few years to reduce complexity and make the development of such systems more efficient and more failure resistant. Currently, those technologies are waiting to be adapted on a larger scale.

The project Embed4auto (Agreement number: DE/08/LLP-LdV/ToI/147109) will provide the European industry with innovative training for model-based development technologies and help to promote the use of model-based technologies in the area of embedded systems development. It aims at transferring results from the previous pilot project Up2UML to the domain of embedded systems, to further European countries and to new industrial sectors.

The work in Embed4Auto is carried out by a strong consortium of research institutions, universities and industry partners from Germany, Sweden, Greek, Turkey and Spain. The project will lead to new technology enhanced VET offers for companies and employees in the area of embedded systems engineering and qualify them to apply model-based technologies in their daily work. Embed4Auto will provide innovative training concepts, delivery modes, production technologies for standards-based technology enhanced learning and it will promote a subject that is important for the European industry.

The main goal of Embed4Auto is to transfer the results of a previous Leonardo da Vinci pilot project (Up2UML: Upskilling to object-oriented software development with the Unified Modeling Language) to other EU countries and new target groups and domains (e.g., automotive industry and its suppliers). This includes the analysis of new requirements and the adaptation, enhancement and extension of the project results in order to cover the needs of other target groups and industrial sectors. Additional tools and methods will be developed and adapted that provide participants in training activities with learning content adapted to their needs and their learning preferences.

By the end of Embed4auto, the project will have contributed to the deployment of model-based technologies to the industry by means of education and training. The results from Embed4Auto will have influenced hundreds of engineers, researchers, students and practitioners. Through training in efficient model-based development, software development and implementation will become considerably shorter which will result in visible business benefits.