Loughborough University is a top-ten rated university in England for research intensity (REF2014) and an outstanding 66% of the work of Loughborough’s academic staff who were eligible to be submitted to the REF was judged as ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’, compared to a national average figure of 43%. In choosing Loughborough for your research, you’ll work alongside academics who are leaders in their field. You will benefit from comprehensive support and guidance from our Doctoral College, including tailored careers advice, to help you succeed in your research and future career. The increasingly interconnected world is advancing so fast that it is overtaking our understanding on how to best architect and maintain future complex systems. In addition, the need to continue to support legacy systems until they can be phased out is a potentially weak link in terms of designing adaptability and resilience into future systems. We are only too aware of the huge cost implications when products enter service and unanticipated behaviours/faults appear. This studentship is focussed on creating a new branch of engineering where functional aspects of a system are maintained within architecture rather than in software code that becomes obsolete in the future. The goal is to create an executable architecture that is independent on the implementation hardware but can be auto-coded for future technology. This will afford a great deal of obsolescence protection whilst facilitating reuse. This research will use the very latest systems and software engineering tools to create a seamless pipeline from system architecture development to deployable software. One of the key research goals is to develop new approaches to detecting undesirable emergent behaviour/design flaws before a product or system goes into service.