The challenges of embedded systems engineering

Embedded system technology has become an important, if not dominating component in the realization of all sorts of high-tech products, machines, and infrastructures. The temptation to create systems with new, powerful, intelligent features has turned embedded software into an essential high-tech ingredient that, exploiting the hardware capabilities afforded by Moore's law, is subject to exponential growth. As has been pointed out by many authors before, the complexity of the embedded software is not just a product of its growing size, but also results from the required relation between the software and its physical environment, both in terms of its execution on physical platforms and in its interaction with the system environment. This combination of digital control and physical phenomena makes it plausible that hybrid modelling and hybrid systems theory have a role to play in the design of embedded systems. Last year Henzinger and Sifakis (The Embedded Systems Design Challenge) suggested that we need the development of more physically informed models of computation combining analytical and constructive elements. This would provide a more fundamental basis for embedded systems design, as well as provide a much needed paradigmatic change for computer science.