High Integrity Systems Engineering (HISE)

The High Integrity Systems Engineering (HISE) group undertakes work on systems and software engineering, with a focus on critical applications, especially safety and security. The group undertakes research and through its strong industrial links is enabled to validate research ideas on real-world problems in domains as diverse as aerospace and healthcare. HISE has strong international links, working with Universities and companies in Australasia, Europe, North and South America including Rolls Royce PLC, Goodrich Control Systems Ltd, BAE systems, the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Trade and Industry.

Group Aims

The High Integrity Systems Engineering Group (HISE) undertakes research and teaching in systems and software engineering, emphasising safety and security-critical applications. It carries out basic research and uses its strong industrial links to validate theory by using real-world problems in domains as diverse as aerospace and healthcare.

Senior Member: John McDermid

Contact Person: Ginny Wilson

Research Areas

Work in requirements engineering for embedded systems aims to reduce the impact of requirements change in concurrent engineering. Formal techniques have been integrated into methods and toolsets used by engineers, linking this work to safety processes.
Work on concurrent reactive systems is developing theory, tools, and case studies for a refinement language called Circus. This involves extensions to incorporate objects, time, synchrony, mobility, and theories and tools for hardware compilation. An application of central interest is the verification of implementations of control systems specified by diagrams. Work on testing is expanding the range of techniques available for Circus.
Work on safety-case development has been widely adopted by industry. Recent advances include management and incremental certification techniques for complex safety cases, nondeterministic systems, autonomous and interacting Systems of Systems, and even a constrained form of Artificial Neural Networks.
New work on security is focusing on issues of distributed systems; initial work on GRID security is now being extended for ad hoc networks.
Work on the Grand Challenges Exercise, an enterprise of the UKCRC (UK Computing Research Committee) to discuss possibilities and opportunities for the advancement of computing research focus on the International Grand Challenge in Verified Software, which we chair. Various pilot projects are carried out locally.

Sponsorship

We receive sponsorship from a variety of government sources including DTI, the EPSRC, the European Commission, the MoD, NASA, the Royal Society and the US Army Research Labs. Research support also comes from European industry; an (incomplete) list of our collaborators is given below. We also have a wide network of collaborators and partners, involving group from Universities and Research Laboratories from around the world.

Research Projects

AGILE
Are you Prepared for the NEC
Circus
DARP
Dependable Computing Systems Centre
DTC
HAWK (IAWG)
ITA
LSCITS
PLASMA
Programming from Control Laws
SEAS DTC
SSEI
Testing Methods for Reactive Systems
University Technology Centre

Industrial Contacts

Agusta Westland Helicopters
Alstec
BAE SYSTEMS
British Energy
DTI
ERA Technology
Escher Technologies
Fraunhofer FOKUS
GE Aviation Systems
General Dynamics
Goodrich
Highways Agency
HSE
IBM (UK, Rational, Haifa, USA)
Jaguar
Land Rover
LDRA
Lionhead Games
Lockheed-Martin
MBDA
Microsoft
NASA
Praxis High Integrity Systems
QinetiQ
Rolls-Royce
SAP (Belfast and Germany)
SEA
SINTEF
Smith Institute
SRI International
Thales (R&T, IS)

Associated Companies

High Integrity Solutions
Origin Consulting

Department of Computer Science

High Integrity Systems Engineering (HISE)

Group Aims

Research Areas

Sponsorship

Research Projects

Industrial Contacts

Associated Companies

Academic Members of the Group

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