The CHESS Project seeks to improve Model Driven Engineering practices and technologies to better address safety, reliability, performance, robustness and other extra-functional concerns while guaranteeing correctness of component development and composition for embedded systems. System development costs will be reduced through extensive use of provable automation and model transformation engines specifically for high-integrity applications in the Railway, Space and Telecommunications domains, and through the identification of feasible solutions to complex system challenges earlier in the development process.

The CHESS Project addresses two key embedded system industrial priorities of providing reference designs and architectures, and also new design methods and tools. It directly responds to the challenge of reducing the system development cost through extensive use of provable automation and model transformation engines, specifically intended for the high-integrity application domain. The new CHESS technologies will also directly reduce the cost of system design and reduce the number of development cycles required to deliver new products to market.

The CHESS Project takes on the challenge of mastering the expected increases in system complexity by elevating the level of abstraction in the user model space and by automating the feasibility analysis and feedback from the solution space. This will specifically assist organisations in managing increases in system complexity. CHESS also contributes to the reduction in the effort and time required for re-validation and re-certification after changes are made by relying on a suite of formally proven and property preserving transformations.