Welcome to COLUMBUS

This document is the final report for the COLUMBUS project,

“Design of embedded controllers for safety critical systems”,

funded by the European Commission (IST-2001-38314).

As its title suggests, the main aim of the COLUMBUS project was the development of a methodology for the design and analysis of embedded control systems. Among the many possible applications of these systems, special emphasis was placed on ones that involve a safety critical component, since they impose the strictest requirements and dictate the development of a systematic methodology to ensure that systems are correct by design.

The development of design methodologies for embedded systems (and in particular safety critical embedded control systems) is widely recognized as an important obstacle that needs to be overcome to enable widespread deployment of embedded electronics in many applications. The importance of the problem is recognized globally and a number of research efforts on this topic are currently underway. To make the most of this global know-how, the COLUMBUS project brought together research teams from the US and the EU that have extensive experience on related problems. As part of this report, we also attempt to summarize our experience working in this transatlantic mode.

The COLUMBUS project started on July 1, 2002 and was completed on June 30, 2004. As will become apparent from this report, during the two years of the project, the COLUMBUS team made substantial contributions to a number of difficult research problems. As the end of the project drew near, the team debated how to best present the results of the project to the diverse cross-section of the research community and practitioners who may benefit from them. Various alternatives (among them summarizing the results in the form of a book) were discussed and rejected. We eventually converged on the production of the electronic publication that you have in your hands (or rather CD reader, or hard drive). The choice of an electronic book over other modes of communicating our results was motivated by a number of considerations, among them:

	The material studied in COLUMBUS is diverse and of interest to a diverse audience. In addition, the different topics require different types of mathematical background and different levels of mathematical sophistication. An electronic report makes it easier to convey to all readers a high level picture of the results and the way they fit together and, at the same time, allows each reader to dig deeper into the details of the parts that best suit their interests and mathematical background.
	The project resulted in a large number of publications that would be difficult to summarize in a conventional report, or book of reasonable length. The electronic report format allowed us to link many of the deliverables and publications directly into the text[1].
	The COLUMBUS project is just part of a global research effort on embedded systems. To allow the reader a more complete picture of the research scene in this area, a number of links to related websites are included throughout the text. If you are on-line while reading the report, these links should be active. Readers who are not already experts in the field could therefore use this report as a starting point for a wider study.

On behalf of the COLUMBUS team I would like to thank the European Commission for giving us the opportunity to conduct this fruitful and exciting project and you for taking the time to read through the results. This is an on-going research effort for all of us. If you have any comments or suggestions, please contact us using the information and links provided in this document.