This paper introduces the ADVANCE approach to engineering concurrent systems using a new component-based approach. A cost-directed tool-chain maps concurrent programs onto emerging hardware architectures, where costs are expressed in terms of programmer annotations for the throughput, latency and jitter of components. These are then synthesized using advanced statistical analysis techniques to give overall cost information about the concurrent system that can be exploited by the hardware virtualisation layer to drive mapping and scheduling decisions. Initial performance results are presented, showing that the ADVANCE technologies could provide a promising approach to dealing with near-and future-term complexities of programming heterogeneous multi-core systems.