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A smart system that monitors the delicate ecological balance at a bay in Newfoundland, a traffic-tracking system in Chicago that combines video surveillance and real-time analytics, and an intelligent toll system in the Swedish capital, Stockholm that reduces vehicular congestion ...

These, said an IBM executive, are but three examples of smart, interconnected, software-driven systems helping resolve real-world challenges.

One of their hallmarks is the way they seamlessly blend software with other elements, including electrical and mechanical systems, noted Grady Booch, chief scientist for software engineering, IBM Research.

Booch, widely known for developing the Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh, was a keynote speaker at the five-day IBM Rational Software 2009 Conference in Orlando.

The event, which concludes today, drew around 3,300 attendees from 47 different countries.

The IBM scientist said the projects at Newfoundland, Chicago and Stockholm exemplify the incredible impact of "intelligent, instrumented and interconnected" systems on every business, sector, industry and geography.  

In the case of SmartBay -- an initiative of the Marine Institute in Newfoundland in partnership with IBM -- the goal is optimizing management of the delicate eco-system at Placentia Bay, located on the south coast of Newfoundland.

The scene of significant industrial activity, Placentia Bay is also considered an environmentally sensitive area, as it teems with diverse marine life.

The many small communities that fringe the bay rely to some extent on the adjoining waters for their livelihood.  

As part of the SmartBay project, Booch said, electronic sensors have been deployed on buoys to track the interaction between, pollution, marine life, and sea states.  

For instance, several meteorological buoys collect sea state and weather data, while other buoys track water quality.

Their information is fused with data from existing sources – including metrics from airborne sensors and online GIS and data visualization tools – to provide key stakeholders access to the information they need to effectively promote sustainable development of the coastal area.

IBM technologies -- such as WebSphere and DB2 – are at the heart of the SmartBay system, Booch noted.

Embedded software – the silent thread

These and other projects, he said, exemplify a phenomenon that's transforming software delivery across industries and sectors -- embedded software.

Embedded software – defined as special-purpose software built into a larger system -- is a key driver of most industries today, he said.

"And yet such software is mostly invisible to the masses, and it isn't recognized by the end user as software in the traditional sense."

Experts on embedded systems echo this view.  While most of the discourse around software revolves around IT systems, they note that such systems incorporate a mere two per cent of microprocessors produced.

"Most microprocessors are in systems for cars, mobile communication, washing machines, aircraft, robots, traffic management cameras and audio equipment," say Christol Ebert and Jurgen Salecker in an article titled "Embedded Software – Technologies and Trends."

Ebert is a partner and managing director at Stuttgart, Germany-based Vector Consulting Services GmbH, and Salecker is competence field manager for embedded systems at the Corporate Technology think tank at Siemens AG.

As embedded software gets more pervasive, they note, it is also growing tremendously complex.  

"Cars today have 100 Mbytes of software running with a complexity growing more quickly than that of IT systems such as those of SAP, Oracle and Microsoft."  A typical modern car, note Ebert and Salecker, contains 30 to 70 embedded systems that communicate with one another across a variety of standardized bus systems.

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