HISC 2025: Future Zone Highlights and Best Poster winner
Posted on November 21, 2025
The Future Zone at this year’s High Integrity Software Conference was full of energy and bright ideas, featuring research on everything from cyber resilience and CHERI hardware to generative AI and fuzz testing.
A huge congratulations to Serdar Akar, Bournemouth University, for being voted this year’s Best Poster winner at the HISC 2025 Future Zone. Read more below about his poster, Towards Productive Cyber Resilience and Safety Analysis in Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)
Serdar Akar’s poster showcases ongoing doctoral research that directly addresses a critical gap in modern defence systems engineering: how to make integrated cyber resilience and safety analysis truly productive and scalable within Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) workflows.
While MBSE is increasingly adopted to manage complexity and reduce costs in programmes such as the UK MoD’s PYRAMID platform, current practices still suffer from manual bottlenecks, poor tool interoperability, scalability limits in large models, and heavy reliance on specialist expertise. These barriers hinder the ability of general systems engineers to perform timely, traceable co-analysis of cyber resilience (e.g. using STRIDE and MITRE ATT&CK) and safety (e.g. STPA) throughout the lifecycle.
Through a mixed-methods research combining systematic literature review, stakeholder engagement, prototype development, and empirical evaluation on representative defence-relevant cases, this project delivers:
- Identification of core challenges and opportunities (scalability, workflow efficiency, interoperability, usability)
- Practical prototypes that automate threat-to-safety traceability, risk prioritisation, and trade-off analysis
- Organizational planned evidence of reduction in analysis time and significantly reduced specialist dependency
- Actionable guidelines enabling general engineers to conduct high-quality resilience and safety analysis within standard MBSE environments
The work provides the empirical evidence base that has so far been missing for confident, widespread adoption of integrated resilience and safety analysis in MBSE across the UK defence enterprise and beyond.
The poster presents the full research methodology, preliminary results, prototype capabilities, measured productivity gains, and future directions including AI-enhanced model checking and standardisation impact.
A valuable session for anyone working on MBSE, digital engineering transformation, cyber resilience, system safety, or defence platform acquisition.
Thank you to Serdar Akar for his Future Zone submission and to his supervisors Huseyin Dogan (Bournemouth University), Shamal Faily (Dstl), Duncan Ki-Aries (Bournemouth University) for their support as regards his research.
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