Newcastle to lead DEPLOY project

Computer scientists from Newcastle University are leading an €18m (£13.4m) EU project designed to make devices as diverse as mobile phones and satellites more robust and reliable.

The DEPLOY project, led by the School of Computing Science, will work across the transportation, automotive, space, telecommunications and business information sectors.

Beginning this week, it builds on a three-year project just completed by the university, which created new ways of building fault tolerance into computer systems.

These methods are now ready to be put to the test by Siemens, Bosch, Space Systems, Nokia and SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing).

Work being carried out will feed into projects such as the 2013 European Space Agency’s mission to explore Mercury and train security on the Paris Metro. The Newcastle team will use formal engineering methods to test the fault tolerance of each system and refine these in an industrial setting to ensure they meet ‘real world’ requirements.

As well as leading the project, Newcastle University is also co-ordinating the dependability systems strand of the research. This will involve working with several of the industrial partners to develop the technology and train them in the use of the new systems.

A pilot will be set up in each different industry sector, which will be tested and developed for a year before going into production.