Five Years of Multi-Disciplinary Academic and Industrial Research: Lessons Learned

The Boderc project was the first broad scale multi-disciplinary project with closely cooperating industrial and academic participants performed by the Embedded Systems Institute. After five years we evaluated the project and collected the lessons learned from this project. We look at the underlying project philosophy, Industry-as-Laboratory, at process and organization issues, and at the project results.The article describes the industrial context, the design of the system (a high-volume printer), and the challenges of creating system designs in the industrial context. We discuss the research propositions to tackle these challenges. The central theme of the research is the use of multi-disciplinary models to predict and analyze system performance and to explore design options.