Engineering the Development of Embedded Systems - Formal Methods and Hybrid Real-Time Systems - page 391

Engineering the Development of Embedded Systems

Mathai Joseph

Tata Consultancy Services
1 Mangaldas Road
Pune 643101 India
[e-mail]

1 Inter Alia

Fifteen years ago, it would have been hard to predict just how large a role the software
industry would play in the life of a developing country. True, the sale of PC's had started
to grow and access to the Internet was slowly spreading but these were trends in the
developed world, far remote from the cities, towns and villages of developing countries.
It was in this world of promise and uncertainty that a few pioneers set out on their
mission to create for the developing world an Institute that would provide them with
knowledge, training and experience. It was not an attempt to transfer trade information
on the use of this or that software package or even to train people in programming skills,
both of which would certainly have found ready acceptance. Instead, it was to share the
conviction that a mathematical understanding and definition of what a program was
to achieve would be the way of the future, bringing abstractness and precision to a
field that was otherwise distinguished more by the scale and detail of how a program
performed its tasks.
Most of the software systems developed at that time (and indeed many developed
even later) have become part of the unwieldy heritage that the industry struggles to
'modernize' today. By comparison, the work of this Institute has acquired even greater
importance today than in the past. Formal techniques, whose propagation in developing
countries has been the major mission of this Institute, have come of age with routine use
in many application areas. Few people would today design a chip or build onboard soft-
ware for a car without using tools that unobtrusively help them to perform the complex
mathematical reasoning that gives them the assurance that the programs they are con-
structing will meet their objectives. From cautious and curious scientific exploration,
formal techniques have now become a widening part of an engineering discipline.
This Festschrifft for Dines Bjorner and Zhou Chaochen is also an apt celebration of
the International Institute for Software Technology that they helped to found and which
has made a place for itself in the software techniques community. Both of them had
long and illustrious careers before coming to Macau but perhaps it will be for what they
achieved here that they will be most remembered.
The informal paper that follows is a reminder that a great deal still remains to be
done. Some of the problems in constructing correct and reliable embedded systems have
been solved but many still remain. In fact, there are strong arguments (e.g. [Lee 2005]
[Henzinger & Sifakis 2006]) that solving the remaining problems will need some major
breakthroughs.