The drastic increase in amount, variant diversity, and complexity of systems and compound systems poses new challenges for the engineering of such systems. These systems and compound systems typically provide highly innovative benefits and must meet significant safety requirements, which must be meet with equally innovative and safety-aware development processes. SPES XT-Core aims at developing industrially applicable solutions for some of these challenges in order to solve existing problems in an efficient, controllable, and verifiable manner.

The project is divided into six engineering challenges. For each engineering challenge, approaches are developed in a number of building blocks that, when combined in a purposive manner, can be used to solve the underlying problem in engineering embedded systems. The building blocks for each engineering challenge will be categorized by means of four cross-sectional concern with the goal of ensuring that the core principles of the SPES approaches (e.g. integrated development, assessability, tool support) are thoroughly considered in every result of the project.