On 17^th January 2023, the XANDAR consortium held a full-day workshop at HiPEAC conference 2023, the premier European forum for experts in computer architecture, programming models, compilers and operating systems for embedded and general-purpose systems.

With the goal to allow researchers from academia and industry to discuss recent advances in the application of the X-by-Construction (XbC) concept to embedded systems, the workshop featured two keynotes, one invited talk, and five presentations from the XANDAR consortium.

In the opening session of the workshop, the project coordinator of XANDAR, Prof. Jürgen Becker (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) gave a short overview of XANDAR and welcomed Prof. Rolf Drechsler (University of Bremen) as the first keynote speaker. Prof. Drechsler gave an insightful speech titled “Fast and Exact is Doable: Polynomial Algorithms along the Design Flow”, highlighting recent developments in the field of Polynomial Formal Verification (PFV) and discussing directions for future work.

The second session was devoted to “Model-based development of safety-critical systems”, comprising an invited talk by the Head of Flight Software Department of CNES, Benoit Frezouls, and presentations from XANDAR partners Tobias Dörr (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) and Bojan Lukic (German Aerospace Center). Benoit Frezouls gave a presentation titled “MBSE applied to generic flight SW partitions through LVCUGEN FSW studio”, before Tobias Dörr presented a concept for the pattern-based deployment of safety mechanisms and Bojan Lukic gave insights into ongoing work on an AI-based flight assistance system.

In the third session, which covered Artificial Intelligence (AI) and performance-oriented code optimization, Prof. Claire Pagetti, Research Director at the French Aerospace Lab (ONERA), presented achievements and ongoing work on the certification of AI-based systems, before Prof. Georgios Keramidas (University of Peloponnese) illustrated how the XANDAR toolchain combines code-level optimizations and task scheduling for hypervisor-based systems.

The fourth session “Target deployment and System-on-Chip (SoC) considerations” included presentations from two more XANDAR partners: Dimitris Karadimas (AVN Group) presented the CI/CD concept of XANDAR, followed by Fahad Siddiqui (Queen’s University Belfast) giving a presentation titled “Cybersecurity Engineering of Safety-critical Embedded Systems”.

The workshop, which attracted and engaged about 20 attendees, closed with a fertile discussion about open issues in the field of safety-critical system design.

Apart from the workshop, XANDAR gained visibility through a poster session for EU projects offering a spotlight on the latest breakthroughs in European-funded research.