Newcastle University

Staff from the Newcastle CPS lab made significant contributions towards the major multi-national research project, COMPASS, funded by the European Union Framework 7 programme.  Newcastle's CP lab co-ordinated the overall project.

COMPASS focussed on an area highly relevant to CPS, systems of systems (SoSs).  An SoS is a system that is composed from constituent parts, each of which is an independent system in its own right.  At the outset of the COMPASS project in 2011, the design of innovative products and services that take advantage of Systems of Systems (SoS) technology was hampered by the complexity caused by the heterogeneity and independence of the constituent systems, and the difficulty of communication between their diverse stakeholders. Developers lacked models and tools to help make trade-off decisions during design and evolution leading to sub-optimal design and rework during integration and in service.

COMPASS developed a modelling framework for SoS architectures and providing a sound, formal semantic foundation to support analysis of global SoS properties.  An extensive tool platform, called Symphony, supports the techniques and language which COMPASS developed for the modelling of systems of systems.  You can download the most recent version of the Symphony tool platform here.

Although the project completed in 2014, the project maintains a club for practitioners and external parties who wish to follow the continued development of COMPASS tools and techniques, and provide feedback on their future direction.  New members are always welcome!  Find out how to join here.

You can also follow COMPASS on Twitter.