Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering / Stephen A. Dyer / Steven Warren / Embedded systems control nearly every device we encounter. Examples abound: appliances, scientific instruments, building environmental controls, avionics, communications, smart phones, and transportation subsystems. These embedded systems can fail in various ways: performance, safety, and meeting market needs. Design errors often cause failures in performance or safety. Market failures, particularly delayed schedule release or running over budget, arise from poor processes. Rigorous methods can significantly reduce the probability of failure. Industry has produced and widely published “best practices” that promote rigorous design and development of embedded systems. Unfortunately, 20 to 35% of development teams do not use them, which leads to operational failures or missed schedules and budgets. This dissertation increases the potential for success in designing and developing embedded systems through the following: 1. It identifies, through literature review, the reasons and factors that cause teams to avoid best practices, which in turn contribute to development failures. 2. It provides a framework, as a psychologically unbiased mediator, to help teams institute best practices. The framework is both straightforward to implement and use and simple to learn. 3. It examines the feasibility of both crowdsourcing and the Delphi method to aid, through anonymous comments on proposed projects, unbiased mediation and estimation within the framework. In two separate case studies, both approaches resulted in underestimation of both required time and required effort. The wide variance in the surveys’ results from crowdsourcing indicated that approach to not be particularly useful. On the other hand, convergence of estimates and forecasts in both projects resulted when employing the Delphi method. Both approaches required six or more weeks to obtain final results. 4. It develops a recommendation model, as a plug-in module to the framework, for the build-versus-buy decision in design of subsystems. It takes a description of a project, compares designing a custom unit with integrating a commercial unit into the final product, and generates a recommendation for the build-versus-buy decision. A study of 18 separate case studies examines the sensitivity of 14 parameters in making the build-versus-buy decision when developing embedded systems. Findings are as follows: team expertise and available resources are most important; partitioning tasks and reducing interdependence are next in importance; the quality and support of commercial units are less important; and finally, premiums and product lifecycles have the least effect on the cost of development. A recommendation model incorporates the results of the sensitivity study and successfully runs on 16 separate case studies. It shows the feasibility and features of a tool that can recommend a build-or-buy decision. 5. It develops a first-order estimation model as another plug-in module to the framework. It aids in planning the development of embedded systems. It takes a description of a project and estimates required time, required effort, and challenges associated with the project. It is simple to implement and easy to use; it can be a spreadsheet, a Matlab model or a webpage; each provides an output like the model for the build-versus-buy decision.

With safety critical software, it is important that the application is safe and stable. While this software can be quality tested with manual testing, automated testing has the potential to catch errors that manual testing will not. In addition there is also the possibility to save time and cost by automating the testing process. This matters when it comes to avionics components, as much time and cost is spent testing and ensuring the software does not crash or behave faulty. This research paper will focus on exploring the usefulness of automated testing when combining it with fuzz testing. It will also focus on how to fuzzy test applications classified into DAL-classifications.

A rapidly changing environment for industrial technology companies operating on a global market has increased the competitiveness and accelerated the rate of new technologies. The demands on companies to be more efficient and innovative without compromising quality are thereby enlarged. To maintain competitiveness and meet customer expectation a well-functioning product development is essential. Correcting product quality issues on newly developed products becomes increasingly more expensive the later it takes place in the development process and problems that arise can often be linked to the product design. In order to secure that new product development projects efficiently can deliver high quality products without compromising cost targets and time-to-market Design Assurance can be applied during the product development. The intention is to uncover and detect problems in the design and prevent errors to occur in the engineering process, by executing controls to assure design has been completed according to standards and policies.  This project aims to investigate Design Assurance to further establish the concept at Alfa Laval BU HSS and describe how product quality is assured in product development. Analysis of literature studies, interviews at Alfa Laval BU HSS as well as benchmarking at three companies; Atlas Copco Industrial Technique, Getinge (Maquet Critical Care division) and Tetra Pak, provide the basis of the results in this study. The results show there are a number of factors greatly influencing an organization’s ability to ensure product quality in product development. Key factors identified in this study are cross functional team work, the internal culture in the organization, firmly established product strategies, product development processes and requirement management and validation capability. These factors can be seen as essential conditions for ensuring product quality during development and prerequisites for establishing Design Assurance at Alfa Laval BU HSS. Key building blocks in the Design Assurance capability are identified and described, which include reviews of actions and project documentation that safeguards continuous improvements and prevent future deficiencies. The Design Assurance activities are identified as documentation management, change management, risk assessments, nonconformance management, product quality follow up and lessons learned. / Dagens industritekniska företag verkar i en global miljö med snabba förändringar, vilket har bidragit till ökad konkurrens och accelererat hastigheten för ny teknik. Därmed har även kraven på företagen att bli mer effevtiva och innovativa, utan att kompromissa med produktens kvalitet, ökat. En väl-fungerande produktutveckling är nödvändig för att bibehålla konkurrenskraft och möta kundernas förväntningar. Ju senare produkters kvalitetsproblem upptäcks och rättas till under utvecklings-processen desto dyrare är det och problemen härstammar ofta från produktens konstruktion. För att säkerställa att nyutvecklingsprojekt effektivt kan leverera högkvalitativa produkter utan att påverka kostnadsmål eller time-to-market, kan Design Assurance tillämpas under produktutvecklingen. Avsikten är att upptäcka, identifiera och förebygga brister i konstruktionen som kan orsaka problem senare under utvecklingen, genom att utföra kontroller för att säkerställa att konstruktionen uppfyller standarder, anvisningar och andra krav. Denna uppsats syftar till att undersöka Design Assurance för att ytterligare etablera konceptet på Alfa Laval BU HSS och beskriva hur produktkvaliteten säkras under produktutvecklingen. Analys av litteraturstudier, intervjuer på Alfa Laval BU HSS samt benchmarking vid tre företag; Atlas Copco Industriteknik, Getinge Maquet Critical Care divisionen och Tetra Pak, utgör grunden för resultatet i denna studie. Resultatet visar att det finns ett antal faktorer som i hög grad påverkar en organisations förmåga att säkerställa produkternas kvalitet i produktutvecklingen. Nyckelfaktorer har i denna studie identifierats som tvärfunktionellt arbete, den interna kulturen på företaget, väl förankrade produkt-strategier, processer inom produktutveckling samt kravhantering och valideringsförmågan under utvecklingen. Dessa faktorer kan ses som nödvändiga förutsättningar för att säkerställa produktkvalitet under produktutveckling och därmed förutsättningar för att framgångsrikt etablera Design Assurance på Alfa Laval BU HSS. Slutligen är de centrala delarna för att genomföra och applicera Design Assurance identifierade och beskrivna, vilka innefattar granskning av handlingar och projektdokument som säkerställer ständiga förbättringar och förebygger framtida brister. Design Assurance-aktiviteter är identifierade som kontroll av korrekt dokumentering, hantering av ändringar, avvikelsehantering, riskbedömningar, uppföljning av produktkvalitet och lärdomar under produktutvecklingsprojektet.