Bridging Domains in Large-scale Complex and Critical Systems, 2025 Ed.

As part of a yearly series of workshops, the TechNexus Programme hosted FORECAST and STEADINESS during the HiPEAC 2025 conference in Barcelona. This drew together diverse expertise from academia, industry and policy for considering the technology bridging challenges at functional and system levels for complex and critical systems.  Raising the visibility of technology integration challenges across expert domains and their solutions represents a driving goal of the community developing around the TechNexus Programme. There is particularly a strong need for this at present given the acceleration of advances in specific technology domains and the highly interconnected nature we see arising. Readers are invited to contact the authors about supporting this initiative. This white paper reflects an overview of discussions among the participants, including descriptions of the topics presented and with also key recommendations emerging.

Such complex and critical systems are the result of drawing together a multitude of expert domains, including influences from the market and product-line, technical advances from functional properties, system-level functionalities, enabling technologies like AI and IoT and of course the aggregating tools and techniques for bridging these domains.  There is still much untapped value here in relation to automation.  However, the TechNexus Programme seeks to help unlock the level above this with respect to blending of technologies and knowledge integration, opening up new dimensions of value generation. Further to this, technology integrations themselves are technologies, all the way to, for instance, railway implementations, and these infrastructure technologies represent markets for all the technologies contained within – so how we support infrastructure technologies has quite a profound impact on our future economies related to national infrastructure across many domains including manufacturing, transport, medicine, and robotics.

There are not only the mechanisms within a system product, or applied R&D to consider, but very likely a need to rethink our approaches for organising, assessing, and supporting development of technology and knowledge integrations, where breakthrough advances are reliant on blending a combination of experts with different domain backgrounds.