Research

Research projects

Research projects
ADACORSA - Airborne data collection on resilient system architectures
2020-2023
ADACORSA targets to strengthen the European drone industry and increase public and regulatory acceptance of BVLOS (beyond visual line-of-sight) drones, by demonstrating technologies for safe, reliable and secure drone operation in all situations and flight phases. The project will drive research and development of components and systems for sensing, telecommunication and data processing along the electronics value-chain. On the system level, the project will deliver hardware and software for reliable sensor fusion and data analytics as well as technologies for secure and reliable drone communication.

CrossControl will contribute to ground systems, utilizing the involvement of drones in a situational awareness concept in industrial vehicle environment, powered by AI/ML analytics. The proceedings will be piloted as onboard edge operations in industrial use cases based on smart construction and forestry applications.

Partners: 50 in total from 11 EU and other associated countries. Lead partner: Infineon, Germany. ADACORSA is part of EU ECSEL program under the Horizon 2020 initiative.

Productive4.0 - Electronics and ICT as enabler for digital industry and optimized supply chain management covering the entire product lifecycle
2017-2020
The main objective of Productive4.0 is to achieve improvement of digitizing the European industry by electronics and ICT. Ultimately, the project aims at suitability for everyday application across all industrial sectors – up to TRL8. It addresses various industrial domains with one single approach of digitalization. What makes the project unique is the holistic system approach of consistently focusing on the three main pillars: digital automation, supply chain networks and product lifecycle management, all of which interact and influence each other. Project website: https://productive40.eu.

CrossControl contributes to the operational platform design and to the industrial use cases, covering implementation and field testing in the concept of mobile vehicles. The approach will cover individual onboard systems as well as fleet management and the required connectivity methodology. The work is performed in collaboration especially with the Finnish consortium members.

Partners: 109 in total from 19 EU and other associated countries, 65% industrial. Productive4.0 is part of EU ECSEL program under the Horizon 2020 initiative.

SeeWork - Digital See- through Structures in Work Machines
2016-2017
The purpose was to develop a digital see-through concept for the operator of the work machine that solve the visibility to blindspots. A robust combination of camera and display technologies is provided to augment the operator’s view. The system senses the surroundings of the vehicle and provides digitally created visual information of the occluded areas to the operator. The information is shown through visualization media, which is seamlessly integrated into the cabin of the machine. The core target is to enable augmenting the view without the user having to wear additional devices or accessories.

CrossControl was involved as a steering group member and directed the research project. Our intake on this was to get information which kind of displays future work vehicles could have. If current separate displays are still needed and is it already possible to use the windscreen as a display.

Partners: CrossControl, Valtra, Sandvik, Kalmar, John Deere Forestry, Wapice, Novatron, OptoFidelity, Konecranes, KONE, Comatec, VTT, TUT

DPSafe and DPSafe2 - Design Patterns for Safety System Development
2015 (DPSafe), 2016 (DPSafe2)
As a product of our collaborative effort in FIMA projects DPSafe and DPSafe2, we have released a public document called “Functional Safety System Designer’s Handbook v2”. This handbook is a collection of architectural patterns which can be used to cope with requirements set by machine safety standards. Our part in these projects was to share our expertise in SW development and HMI devices.

Project teams consisting of local mobile machinery manufacturers, software companies and researchers from Tampere University of Technology (TUT) and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland met every few months for two years to discuss different architecture patterns. These patterns originate from literature and company interviews held by university researchers. Interviews were held confidentially keeping company anonymity. This approach enabled openness and easy collaboration between companies working on same industry field.

Introduced patterns concentrate on representing safety related function architecture on a high level. They do not take a stand on used technologies or down-stream implementation methods, but abstract all factors and their interactions still giving a few real life examples on each pattern.

Partners: TUT, VTT and FIMA member companies.

CRAFTERS - ConstRaint and Application driven Framework for Tailoring Embedded Real-time Systems
2012-2015
ICT-based service and product innovation is curtailed by the growing vertical chain of dependence on poorly interoperable proprietary technologies. This issue was identified to have high impact on innovation productivity. Convergence of shared technologies and markets are targeted as a remedy. Real-time applications for heterogeneous, networked, embedded many-core systems suffer from the lack of trusted pathways to system realization and application deployment. This project brings to bear a holistically designed ecosystem from application to silicon, with an ecosystem realized as a tightly integrated multi-vendor solution and tool chain complementing existing standards. Marketable lead applications driving ecosystem development and benchmarking on the fields of industrial applications, intelligent transport systems, video and image processing, and wireless communications are produced. Key challenges include guaranteeing secure, safe, reliable, and timely operation, back-annotation based forward system governance, tool-tool, tool-middleware, and middleware-hardware exchange interfaces, and energy management with minimal run-time overhead.

Partners: 26 in total. CRAFTERS is part of EU ARTEMIS program.

FAMOUS - Future Semi-Autonomous Machines for Safe and Efficient Worksite
2011-2014
FAMOUS targets to maximal productivity and safety by predictive and adaptive automation, by means of implementing new machine and process control systems based on situational awareness, dynamic risk assessment and flexible safety functions. Semi-autonomous functions will also make machines less dependent on human mistakes of the operator, or other work site personnel. Under failure situations machines can continue operation in limited modes instead of full stop. Advanced operator assistance also benefits from the information of the safety functions.

Partners: Aalto University, TUT, VTT, FIMECC, Sandvik, Wärtsilä and nine other FIMA member companies. FAMOUS belongs to a larger program called EFFIMA – Energy and Life Cycle Cost Efficient Machines.

ATAC - Advanced Test Automation for Complex Software-Intensive Systems
2011-2014
The ATAC project addresses the problem of automated testing of complex and highly configurable software intensive systems. The ATAC consortium, with many partners from industry and research throughout Europe, aims at developing, enhancing, and deploying high performance methods and tools for quality assurance of large and distributed software-intensive systems.

Partners: See the (upcoming) project website for all European partners. The Swedish partners are Bombardier Transportation, CrossControl, Ericsson, Swedish Institute of Computers Science (SICS), and Mälardalen University (MDH).

SafeCer - Safety Certification of software-intensive systems with reusable components
2011-2013 (pSafeCer), 2012-2015 (nSafeCer)
The project SafeCer is a pioneer project which will develop methods for modularized safety argumentation. This project consisting of 30+ partners throughout Europe, both academic institutions and companies, and is funded by ARTEMIS JU and Vinnova.

Partners: See the project website for all European partners. The Swedish partners are Mälardalen University (MDH), Volvo Technology, Volvo Construction Equipment, SP and Quviq.

TIKOSU – Database-centric development of machine control systems
2009-2011
To eliminate overlapping work and to ensure consistency of data throughout the whole lifecycle of a product, the use of an Integrated Industrial Documentation and Analysis database (IIDAbase) is studied in this project. Marko Elo has acted as steering group member in this project.

Partners: VTT, HUT, University of Patras, University of Dresden, FIMA, Tekes. Our contribution was channeled through FIMA.

Safety-Critical Component-Based Systems
Rickard Land, 2006-2011
Post-doc project (together with Mälardalen University. The project intends to study practices which enable reuse of existing software components during product development in order to improve the efficiency, while also meeting the requirements on the integrity of the system and functions, as well as the requirements on e.g. documentation and traceability. Rikard Land successfully defended his PhD thesis in 2006.

Partners: Mälardalen University (MDH).

Efficient Certification of functional Safety for Software systems
Mikael Åkerholm, 2008-2010
Post-doc project, research on Safety-Critical Component-Based Systems. The goal was to develop an efficient approach for development of software that was certifiable with respect to functional safety. To efficiently develop such software systems today, without doubt, one of the greatest challenges for Swedish machine and automotive industry. Mikael Åkerholm successfully defended his PhD thesis in 2008.

Partners: Mälardalen University (MDH).

TINAT – Automated testing during the work machine integration stage
2008-2009
TINAT project involved development of methods for automated testing of control systems, targeting to improve overall efficiency, repeatability and reliability of integration testing. The project involved two case studies, and CCSimTech was involved in one of them, as a tool for building a simulated test environment. Paulus Numminen acted as steering group member in this project.

Partners: TUT, VTT, FIMA, Tekes. Our contribution was channeled through FIMA.

Predictability and Resource Utilization in Component-Based Embedded Real-Time Systems
PhD student Johan Fredriksson, 2008
Supported/employed PhD student Johan Fredriksson in his research on Predictability and Resource Utilization in Component-Based Embedded Real-Time Systems, successfully defended his PhD thesis in 2008. With increase of software complexity and demands for improved development efficiency, there is a need for new technologies and methods that can cope with these challenges. In this thesis we address this challenge, and three novel solutions are presented for improving predictability and utilization of resources in component-based ERTS.

Reusability of Software Components in embedded systems
PhD student Mikael Åkerholm, 2008
Research on Reusability of Software Components in embedded systems, with a focus on the Vehicular Domain, In this thesis we describe how reusability benefits of component-based software engineering can be utilized for organizations acting in the vehicular domain. Mikael Åkerholm successfully defended his PhD thesis in 2008.

Software Component Technologies for Heavy Vehicles
PhD student Anders Möller, 2005
Research on Software Component Technologies for Heavy Vehicles, successfully defended his Licentiate thesis in 2005. The software component-technologies available on the market have not been generally accepted by the vehicular industry. In order to better understand why this is the case, Anders Möller conducted a survey - identifying the industrial requirements that are deemed decisive for introducing a component technology.