Research

Defence and Aerospace Research Partnership in High Integrity Real Time Systems

At the end of 1998 the Defence and Aerospace Foresight Panel announced the formation of a number of Defence and Aerospace Research Partnerships (DARPs), including one in High Integrity Real Time Systems (HIRTS). The purpose of the DARPs is to carry out work, which is of value to the defence and aerospace community as a whole, and thus is best undertaken in an open partnership, not as a company-specific activity. The current members of the HIRTS DARP are BAE SYSTEMS, Rolls-Royce plc, QinetiQ and the University of York. It is anticipated that this membership will expand in the future to include companies in the aerospace supply chain, certification agencies and other universities.

The DARP builds on and complements the work of the BAE SYSTEMS funded Dependable Computing Systems Centre (DCSC) and the Rolls-Royce plc funded University Technology Centre (UTC) in Systems and Software Engineering. The DARP will carry out its work in two main ways:

• through working groups studying matters of interest to the community as a whole
• conducting collaborative research on topics of interest to several of the members, where appropriate building on existing work in the DCSC and UTC.

The research activity started in October 2002 and is divided into three main groups (or strands):

• Strand 1: Model Based System Engineering
• Strand 2: Safety in Emerging Classes of Systems
• Strand 3: Cost and Risk