Software and Systems (SAS)

The Division of Software and Systems is part of the Department of Computer and Information Science. The division conducts research and education in software engineering and computer systems.

A person sits in front of a computer screen and handles a floor robot Photo credit Jonas Järmen Research and education are conducted in the following areas:

Software Engineering
Programming Models and Environments
Software and System Modelling and Simulation
System Software
Embedded/Cyberphysical Software/Hardware Systems
Computer Systems Engineering
Real-Time Systems and System Dependability
Parallel and Distributed Software and Systems
Software and System Verification and Testing

Research

The research activities covers both basic research and projects in cooperation with industry - projects are or have been conducted in cooperation with ABB Robotics, ABB Industrial Systems, Ericsson Softlab AB, Ericsson Radio Systems, Ericsson Telecom, SKF, Saab, Saab Dynamics, Saab Combitech and several other companies.

Hands on laptop keyboard, a circuit board in the background Photo credit Jonas Järmen
In addition, the research activities include several long-term open-source system development efforts, such as the OpenModelica framework for object-oriented equation-based modeling and simulation of cyberphysical systems, and the SkePU high-level programming framework for heterogeneous parallel systems.

Nine full professors, eight associate/assistant professors and several postdocs are involved in the research together with about 25 graduate students.

Students listening to a teacher pointing to an example at a big screen. Photo credit Jonas Järmen

The SaS Seminars is a permanent series of open seminars with topics related to research at the division.

Research is conducted in three laboratories

Embedded Systems (ESLAB)
Codesign and design for testability of embedded/cyberphysical hardware/software systems and formal methods for embedded systems.

Programming Environments (PELAB)
Software engineering tools and architectures, large-scale software engineering, model-based software engineering, programming languages and systems, including compilers, debuggers, testing tools, and programming tools for parallel, distributed and real-time systems.

Real Time Systems (RTSLAB)
Dependable systems and networks, including reliability, safety and security, resource efficiency with respect to computation capacity, memory, bandwidth and energy.

Education

The division accounts for a significant share of the department's comprehensive undergraduate and master-level education activities, operating about 70 undergraduate/master-level courses per year as well as providing final-thesis supervision. Group of students working on computers..

Group of students working on computers..

Jonas Järmen

The undergraduate teaching activities are jointly carried out by the researchers and by the UPP education group for programming and programming didactics, which consists of about ten full-time university teachers and many teaching assistants.

Doctoral studies are offered in the field of Computer Science.

News at SAS

News and major articles

A part of the supercomputer that glows red.

AI may boost society's cybersecurity

The race between hackers trying to crack systems vital to the functioning of society and cybersecurity experts is constantly ongoing. LiU-researchers will now develop AI that can detect hacker attacks and take action before any damage is done.

Aseel Berglund researches movement at work.

Game at work – for your health

Humans are hunters and gatherers. But in today’s modern society, we are sitting more than ever, which is bad for our Stone Age body. Researchers Aseel and Erik Berglund want to change this with the help of computer games at work.

Power generation in an illustrated landscape

Open Modelica helping to solve complex societal issues

OpenModelica is a free tool, partially developed at Linköping University, to model and simulate complex systems. It is an open-source system, which enables many actors to contribute and benefit companies and society.

Research at SAS

Resilient Information and Control Systems (RICS)

Relying on service continuity for societal functions starts by understanding the complex socio-technical systems that must operate to deliver electricity, water, heat and other critical services to society.

Image illustrating computer programming with a number of different symbols.

Adaptive Software for the Heterogenous Edge-Cloud-Continuum - ASTECC

ASTECC is a 5-year cooperative research project in software systems at the Department of Computer and Information Science. It is funded by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF).

robot dog Spot, drone, small helicopter, operator

WASP at Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA)

WASP, Wallenberg AI autonomous systems and software program, is the largest individual research investment in Sweden in modern times. One of the WASP research environments at LiU is located at the Department of Computer and Information Science.

Latest publications

2025

Junqiang Jiang, Shengjie Jin, Zhifang Sun, Jinxue Duan, Lizhi Liu, Li Pan, Zebo Peng (2025) An Efficient Approach for Improving Message Acceptance Rate and Link Utilization in Time-Sensitive Networking ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, Vol. 24, p. 1-25 (Article in journal)

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2024

José Antonio Hernández López, Máté Földiák, Daniel Varro (2024) Text2VQL: Teaching a Model Query Language to Open-Source Language Models with ChatGPT 27TH INTERNATIONAL ACM/IEEE CONFERENCE ON MODEL DRIVEN ENGINEERING LANGUAGES AND SYSTEMS, MODELS, p. 13-24 (Conference paper)

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Aren A. Babikian, Daniel Varro (2024) OPTANGLE at the SBFT 2024 Tool Competition - Cyber-Physical Systems Track 2024 IEEE/ACM INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON SEARCH-BASED AND FUZZ TESTING, SBFT 2024, p. 73-74 (Conference paper)

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Carlos Dura Costa, José Antonio Hernández López, Jesus Sanchez Cuadrado (2024) ModelMate: A recommender for textual modeling languages based on pre-trained language models 27TH INTERNATIONAL ACM/IEEE CONFERENCE ON MODEL DRIVEN ENGINEERING LANGUAGES AND SYSTEMS, MODELS, p. 183-194 (Conference paper)

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Ahmad Usman, Mikael Asplund (2024) Remote Attestation with Software Updates in Embedded Systems

Azeem Ahmad, Dimitris Rentas, Daniel Hasselqvist, Pontus Sandberg, Kristian Sandahl, Aneta Vulgarakis (2024) Test Case Selection in Continuous Regression Testing Using Machine Learning: An Industrial Case Study Proceedings of 2024 IEEE 48th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), p. 33-38 (Conference paper)

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Abdelazim Hussien, Farhad Soleimanian Gharehchopogh, Anas Bouaouda, Sumit Kumar, Gang Hu (2024) Recent applications and advances of African Vultures Optimization Algorithm Artificial Intelligence Review, Vol. 57, Article 335 (Article in journal)

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Ulf Kargén, Daniel Varro (2024) Towards Automated Test Scenario Generation for Assuring COLREGs Compliance of Autonomous Surface Vehicles Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 27th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, p. 249-256 (Conference paper)

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Kristian Sandahl, Bjorn Regnell, Markus Borg (2024) The Magazine at 40: Viewing Requirements Engineering Through a Ruby Lens IEEE Software, Vol. 41, p. 17-22 (Article in journal)

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Pranav Mehta, Natee Panagant, Kittinan Wansasueb, Sadiq M. Sait, Ali Riza Yildiz, Sumit Kumar, Betul Sultan Yildiz, Abdelazim Hussien (2024) Optimization of vehicle conceptual design problems using an enhanced hunger games search algorithm Materialprüfung (München) (Article in journal)

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