XANDAR project was presented on the main track of research projects in the context of the 31st International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) which remains the largest conference covering the rapidly growing area of field-programmable logic and reconfigurable computing.

Georgios Keramidas, assistant professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a senior researcher at the embedded system design and application laboratory of the University of Peloponnese in Greece gave an overview of the project and its vision in addressing the challenges of the ICT-50 call (Software Technologies) under the subtopic Development tools & methods for interoperable, adaptive, secure and trustworthy software.

XANDAR sets forwards a new X-by-Construction approach for safety critical systems and the goal of the project is to build a toolchain by incorporating the model-based development tool PREEvision the TA Tool Suite, both developed by Vector (partner of the project), and the well-known Ptolemy II framework.

The purpose of PREEvision is to face the challenges of model-based development of electric and electronic systems in vehicles and to support the entire process starting from requirements all the way through to the final software and hardware. To enable a seamless X-by-Construction development process for non-functional requirements like timing, in the XANDAR project PREEvision and TA Tool Suite will be enhanced. Also, in the context of the project, a library-based approach to non-functional requirements, such as functional safety and cyber security, are researched.

The second main part of the XANDAR toolchain is Ptolemy II; an open-source software framework supporting experimentation based on the actor-oriented design paradigm.  Ptolemy II will be appropriately extended for the simulation of the system and subsystems in an environment model, considering the advantages of its key parts that enable the interoperability of distinct models of computation with a well-defined semantics as well as the interaction of continuous dynamics and imperative logic.

The XANDAR toolset targets to offer, on top of the previous tools, the semi-automatic generation of software components following a pattern-based approach for enhancing the system with safety/security mechanisms and finally the generation of an optimized code (with the required metadata) for the target system.