Following the successful first workshop on Automatic Program Generation for Embedded Systems (APGES 2007 http://www.gpce.org/07/APGES07), held in Salzburg, Austria in October 2007, as part of Embedded Systems Week (ESWeek 2007), submissions are invited for a special issue of the journal "Science of Computer Programming".

Original papers are invited exploring the problems of program generation in embedded systems, especially in the conceptual and theoretical foundations for software generation tools that can enhance the robustness and productivity of generation-based embedded software engineering. Revised and extended versions of papers that were presented at the workshop are welcomed, and should take advantage of any feedback that
was offered at the workshop. New papers that were not presented at the workshop are also welcome. All papers will be reviewed to normal journal standards by an international panel of referees.

The increase in complexity of embedded systems software has led to greater interest in improved automation of software production. Automatic program generation is widely promoted in embedded systems design in the form of model-driven development, software product lines, automatic design-space exploration and tailor-made data management, as well as more familiar template-based instantiation of software designs. By taking advantage of the opportunities offered by new research, for example in programming languages and compiler techniques, it may be possible to achieve dramatic productivity
gains, with consequently reduced time to market, and yet still offer the necessary strong guarantees of nonfunctional behaviours such as time, space restrictions, power consumption, reliability and other importantsystem metrics. The challenge is to achieve this vision while remaining focused on issues of practicality and generality.

The topics to be covered by this journal special issue include (but are not restricted to):

â?¢ Industrial experience of automatic program generation techniques
â?¢ Correctness and safety issues in model-driven generators
â?¢ Automatic design-space exploration for resource-bounded systems
â?¢ New tools and methods for automatic generation of embedded systems
â?¢ Models for automatically generating embedded systems, including model-driven design
approaches
â?¢ Tailor-made data management and generation of embedded database systems
â?¢ New and emerging program generation technology
â?¢ Models and analysis of real-time, hard-space and power consumption constraints for reasoning
about automatically generated embedded systems
â?¢ Software product lines, languages for architectures andconfigurations of embedded systems
â?¢ Optimisation of generated programs for embedded systems