9. Reflections on the Octopus Project

How to develop adaptive high-tech embedded systems? This question has motivated this book. Adaptivity provides a wider operational envelope of systems and enables new market opportunities. Effective development of such systems requires a systematic approach that enables to include the adaptive capabilities at various system levels. This book presents the most important results of the Octopus project. Being an industry-as-laboratory project, Octopus brought together academic partners and engineers from Océ-Technologies. Industrial challenges in professional printing motivated the research and results were validated in industrial practice. This approach turned out to be successful, with results ranging from improved control schemes for adaptive inkjet printing to design-space exploration tooling for embedded electronics and architecting patterns for adaptive embedded systems. Octopus confirmed some important points of attention for industry-as-laboratory projects. First, the paradigm needs academic researchers with a strong motivation to improve the industrial state-of-the-art. Second, it is not always easy to combine progress of industrial practice with scientific progress. A crisp definition of industrially relevant and academically challenging driver cases is crucial.