The objective of ARES is to enable software developers to explicitly describe, assess, and manage architectures of embedded software families. This is achieved by selecting, extending and developing a framework of methods, processes and prototype tools for incorporating architectural reasoning along the life-cycle of embedded software family.

Results of ARES will help to design reliable systems with embedded software, that satisfy important quality requirements, evolve gracefully and may be built in-time and on-budget.

The project is organised in two phases. The first 12-month phase is devoted to analyse the problems of the business units of the industrial partners in architecting families of embedded software, evaluate the applicability of existing technology to address the problems, estimate the feasibility and plan the achievement of the missing or improved solutions. The second phase is devoted to research and to develop the promising approaches to solve identified and analysed problems of software architecture in industry.

The research will be conducted along the four most important aspects for the SW industry:

- Specification of software architecture
- Architecture recovery
- Architectural assessment and analysis of software
- Development and evolution of family architectures

All methods, processes and tools will be developed and validated in the context of existing industrial products. Additionally, affiliated companies of industrial partners will run parallel industrial research projects that apply ARES methodology to pilot development in their domains and incorporate the results in their SW life cycle.