April 6, 2001
Weixiong Zhang, Ph.D., and Ron Cytron, Ph.D., associate professors of computer science, have received a cooperative agreement totaling slightly more than $1 million from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) to solve problems in networked embedded systems (NEST).
These are small, "smart" devices, such as sensors, with information-processing software embedded within.
DARPA is the main research and development organization of the U.S. Department of Defense.
Embedded systems are becoming increasingly important in many areas, such as avionics, plant automation and weapons systems. They are basic building blocks of large networked embedded systems that will prevail in successful mechanical-electronic systems in the future.
But most existing systems cannot meet tight real-time requirements and have limited adaptation to environmental dynamics and changes within the systems. More importantly, embedded-system developers have limited experience and a small amount of tools for developing large systems, and they have no knowledge of how such a system will perform and behave in real-world applications.
Zhang and Cytron intend to address real-time performance and adaptation challenges of the NEST program with innovative modeling, analysis and problem-solving techniques. They also will develop problem-solving algorithms that exploit features such as phase transitions.
In addition to analytical results and implemented algorithms, Zhang and Cytron intend to develop a software package of system-development tools and a software system for NEST applications.
The project will officially start in June and will last 40 months.
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