The ITEA Board instituted the ITEA Achievement Award to reward high-level technical contributions based on true European collaboration that lead to significant results and thus further promote the programme and its goals.

Each year this prestigious honour highlights a highly successful project that represents best practice. Major factors in deciding this year's award – which was presented by Mr Francisco Vallejo Serrano, Regional Minister of Innovation, Science and Enterprise, during the symposium dinner – were innovation, exploitation and dissemination. As ITEA aims to make Europe's industry more competitive, effective industrial exploitation of the results of projects is crucial. Such results can be used in various ways, for example via:
•  highly innovative solutions
•  implementation of standards & the adoption and diffusion of platforms
•  new services based on the software, including those used within industries
•  use of the software in basic network operations
•  licensing & spin-offs
•  product sales (direct, in packages or via OEMs)

The Board selected the EAST-EEA project (Electronics Architecture and Software Technology - Embedded Electronic Architecture) ast the winner of the 2004 Achievement Award. EAST-EEA made an important step towards standardisation by creating a generic embedded electronic architecture for the automotive industry.   

Mr Francisco Vallejo Serrano, Minister of Innovation, Science and Enterprise in the Andalusion Regional Government, presented the Award to the winning team. He thanked ITEA for having chosen Andalusia as the venue for the 2004 Symposium. He stressed: "the Andalusian government supports innovation as the main key strategy to continue transforming the social and economic situation of our region. Today Andalusia is fully aware of the fact that innovation is the one and only way to guarantee progress, wealth, good quality jobs and social welfare".

full speech

The EAST-EEA project has shown a major step forward for the European automotive industry. T he costs associated with software development for new vehicle function s are increasing dramatically. One major factor for this cost explosion is that every manufacturer develops its own integration frameworks for communication and software interfaces, for tool environments, and for composition rules. EAST-EEA addresses the need for hardware and software interoperability through the development of an integration platform for automotive electronics, based on the definition of an open systems architecture. By enabling re-use of hardware and software, the project offers opportunities for dramatic cost reduction s and ensures the leading position of European car manufacturers and suppliers into the future.

The EAST-EEA project had a volume of 250 person years and a budget of 40 Million Euros. It teamed up 23 partners from 4 European countries, including car manufacturers, equipment suppliers, academia and research centers centres working in the automotive research domain.

EAST-EEA resulted in a new software architecture, which allows enables for the easier integration of electronic control units of European suppliers in vehicles of European manufacturers. This will lead to a faster time-to-market and an improvement of quality. Newly developed processes and tools support the interface design of the electronic control units based on the new software architecture under automotive cost, delay and quality constraints. The concepts and the software were validated in all car domains: body electronics, powertrain, telematics, human machine interfaces and chassis.

More information on EAST-EEA:
- project presentation ITEA Symposium, Thursday 7 October, 2004
- project leaflet
- project website
- pictures Award presentation
- press release