Reinforcing the initiatives to support safe and reliable integrated systems

  In this modern age, the IT-based society is composed of a wide variety of systems, ranging from those that are indispensable to the crucial infrastructure for supporting our basic day-to-day human livelihood to industrial products that help make our personal lives more convenient or fulfilling. Many of the services we enjoy today are provided by these individual products and embedded systems that work interactively, together or in combination, as an “integrated system”, also referred to as the “system of systems” by some technical circles. Such “integrated systems” are used for various purposes in different situations by a vast number of people from all walks of life, regardless of age or gender. We have come to know that apparently, there are problems attributable to such diverse usage and complex configuration of integrated systems, and more importantly, that they are unique to integrated systems, requiring us to distinguish them from the problems that occur in conventional information systems and treat them separately.
  In order to realize an IT-based society that makes us feel secure, safe and pleasant, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure the safety and reliability of the individual systems that constitute each integrated system, as well as to build and maintain highly safe and reliable integrated systems by resolving the inherent issues that impact the integrated system as a whole. Likewise, Integrated Systems Project (a.k.a. Joint Project) aims at realizing a secure, safe and pleasant IT-based society by engaging in activities geared to identify, address and resolve such issues specific to integrated systems.