Open License Society ______Only software can be perfect

On 1st September, Altreonic was officially created as a spin-off of Open License Society. The team is composed of 10 people and headed by Eric Verhulst, a veteran guru in real-time multi-processor operating systems and embedded systems. While Open License Society (www.OpenLicenseSociety.org) researches a unified systems engineering methodology and already developed tools to support it, Altreonic is putting the research into practice. The goal is "Push the button, ... high reliability!" for embedded systems.

High reliability is often seen as an extra characteristic of the system of product requiring a lot of extra cost and effort to develop it. Based on the research done at Open LIcense Society, tere is reason to believe that it doesn't require more development effort provided the development process is right and provided trustworthy components are used. Altreonic provides the two in an integrated way.

The Meta-Cookbook environment acts like a web based on-line project support tool, allowing companies to cover from requirements and specifications till final product. The meta-cookbook is the basis and turned into a company specific cookbook and design wizard supporting the engineers as well as the project managers on a continuous and iterative basis. 

In parallel Altreonic's offers a powerful visual modeling and simulation environment for developing real-time embedded application software. Applications are defined, template code generated and runtime traces allow to visually profile the application. This environment is available for Windows and Linux and includes system simulation on the host system. At the core it is a very compact but scalable distributed Real-Time Operating System, called OpenComRTOS. As it is the key component, it was formally developed and verified, all available under an "Open License". OpenComRTOS is very scalable, supporting from single microcontrollers to distributed networks. The code size is only 5 KB and can be reduced to about 1 KB. Still it supports system wide Events, Semaphores, FIFO queues, Ports, Resources, Memory Pools and a generic entity called a "hub". This allows the user to add application specific services without a need to change the kernel. Current ports include: Melexis MLX16, Atmel AVR and Xilinx MicroBlaze.

Open License Society is continuing its research and now looking at how a formalised systems and software engineering methodology can be combined with an incremental approah. At the same time, formal methods are investigated for practical use, i.e. how can a system or software best be verified and proven to be meetings its specifications.

Altreonic is complementing its offering with training and engineering services. For more information, contact Altreonic at info.request @ altreonic.com