Component-based Software Engineering Approach Research Articles

Visual Programming Environments for End-User Development of intelligent and social robots, a systematic review

Abstract Robots are becoming interactive and robust enough to be adopted outside laboratories and in industrial scenarios as well as interacting with humans in social activities. However, the design of engaging robot-based applications requires the availability of usable, flexible and accessible development frameworks, which can be adopted and mastered by researchers and practitioners in social sciences and adult end users as a whole. This paper surveys Visual Programming Environments aimed at enabling a paradigm fostering the so-called End-User Development of applications involving robots with social capabilities. The focus of this article is on those Visual Programming Environments that are designed to support social research goals as well as to cater for professional needs of people not trained in more traditional text-based computer programming languages. This survey excludes interfaces aimed at supporting expert programmers, at allowing industrial robots to perform typical industrial tasks (such as pick and place operations), and at teaching children how to code. After having performed a systematic search, sixteen programming environments have been included in this survey. Our goal is two-fold: first, to present these software tools with their technical features and Authoring Artificial Intelligence modeling approaches, and second, to present open challenges in the development of Visual Programming Environments for end users and social researchers, which can be informative and valuable to the community. The results show that the most recent such tools are adopting distributed and Component-Based Software Engineering approaches and web technologies. However, few of them have been designed to enable the independence of end users from high-tech scribes. Moreover, findings indicate the need for (i) more objective and comparative evaluations, as well as usability and user experience studies with real end users; and (ii) validations of these tools for designing applications aimed at working “in-the-wild” rather than only in laboratories and structured settings.

A Personalized and Platform-Independent Behavior Control System for Social Robots in Therapy: Development and Applications

Social robots have been proven beneficial in different types of healthcare interventions. An ongoing trend is to develop (semi-)autonomous socially assistive robotic systems in healthcare context to improve the level of autonomy and reduce human workload. This paper presents a behavior control system for social robots in therapies with a focus on personalization and platform-independence. This system architecture provides the robot an ability to behave as a personable character, which behaviors are adapted to user profiles and responses during the human-robot interaction. Robot behaviors are designed at abstract levels and can be transferred to different social robot platforms. We adopt the component-based software engineering approach to implement our proposed architecture to allow for the replaceability and reusability of the developed components. We introduce three different experimental scenarios to validate the usability of our system. Results show that the system is potentially applicable to different therapies and social robots. With the component-based approach, the system can serve as a basic framework for researchers to customize and expand the system for their targeted healthcare applications.

Towards The Adoption of Modern Software Development Approach: Component Based Software Engineering

Objectives: This paper discusses about the component based software engineering approach along with its classification of various approaches of CBSE and Component Based Development [CBD] and the life cycle development model of Component Based Software Development [CBSD] has been proposed by the component re-usability concept in lieu of reducing the software cost. Method: The main focus of the software engineering and component based software engineering is the development of the software in such a manner that it might be used again for the development of some other software. Component Based Software Engineering [CBSE] includes the use of components lying in the component repository while software re-engineering focusses relies with using the concept of forward and reverse engineering. This is done for reducing the software development cost by making use of Component Based Software Engineering [CBSE] principles and s/w reengineering techniques. Findings: Now a-days the development of software from the scratch has become less prioritized and is being used very less. Component based software engineering plays a very vital role in developing of the software not from scratch but instead using the existing components for the development of new software. Hence it can be concluded or finded that the cost of the software development from the re-usability concept can be reduced to a large extent in comparison to the software development from the very scratch being a very costly measure. The proposed model will be helpful in reducing the software development cost by using the component based development strategy. Applications / Improvements: The proposed SDLC model for CBSD can be used for the real life applications as well and thereby can be re-used again and again as per the requirements of the industry.

Issues and Concerns In Software Component Selection

The increasing availability of COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) components in the market of software development has concretized the opportunity of building whole systems based on previously built components. Component- Based Software Engineering (CBSE) is an approach which is used to improve efficiency and productivity of software system with the help of reusability. CBSE approach improves software development productivity and software quality by selecting pre-existing software components. Reusability in Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) not only reduces the time to market in development but also brings the cost down of development heavily. This paper represents the challenges which are faced by software developer during component selection like reliability, time, components size, fault tolerance, performance, components functionality and components compatibility. This paper also summarizes algorithms used for component retrieval according to availability of component subset.

Integrated MARTE-based model for designing component-based embedded real-time software

Recently, modeling and implementation of Embedded Real Time System (ERTS) are unavoidably becoming more complicated to develop and be reused because of the increasingly complex design. The complexity is due to the functionality increment factor in accordance with users' needs and demands, resulting in the growing scale of the developed systems. The current development approach based on Object-Oriented (OO) does not match the current requirements of the system. The OO approach has numerous flaws, thus, Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) has been appointed to resolve those problems. However, the current CBSE approach also has some drawbacks such as lack of ERTS standardized modeling and specific development methodology. The problems concerning the established ERTS development methodologies, Methods for Component-Based Real-Time Object-Oriented Development Testing (MARMOT) shows the capabilities to tackle ERTS modeling and implementation using CBSE strategy are partially provide the required standard modeling language for development tool adaptation. Thus, an integrated component model is proposed, by integrating MARMOT and a Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile known as Modeling and Analysis for Real-Time and Embedded (MARTE), which can be adapted to the CBSE approach standard modeling. In addition, the proposed model can improve the existing MARMOT software process. The findings showed that the proposed model has reduced ERTS development complexity by enhancing the design mechanisms.

Fuzzy Multi-criteria Approach for Component Selection of Fault Tolerant Software System under Consensus Recovery Block Scheme

The vibrant and advanced software development tools not only provide software with versatile functions for radical users but at the same time, an easy to use GUI for naive users. APS (Application Package Software) has provided a customised approach for developing independent software components which are ready to be integrated with existing software systems. The APS along with CBSE (Component Based Software Engineering) has an inordinate potential for reducing development time, cost and effort, which otherwise may extend beyond weeks or months’ time for integration. Further, the CBSE approach promotes software reusability i.e. reusing the available components. A component can be reused after fabrication which will include the fabrication cost and time. For development of economical and reliable software, components can be procured in the form of Commercial off-The Shelf (COTS) components from the vendor or may be developed in-house or can be fabricated. This decision is based on several parameters. The aim of this paper is to select the suitable mix of components using Build-or-buy strategy or considering fabrication and to propose a multi-objective model for software modular system with objective of maximizing reliability while simultaneously minimizing the cost, execution time and Source Lines of Code (SLOC) using Consensus Recovery Block Scheme.

Reusability-based quality framework for software components

Component based software engineering (CBSE) is a pivotal approach to software development since it helps to give much aspired benefits like reusability, on-time delivery, high quality at low cost to software companies. Therefore, individual software components must be selected with care as these are crucial to the success of the CBSE approach. The selection of a highly reusable and high-quality component is still a herculean task since stakeholders with varying expectations are involved in the software engineering process. This paper presents a reusability based quality model, which is suited to the identification and evaluation of software components. Three major stakeholders are recognized, which are important in the selection of a software component as well as to the development of software. In the proposed model, only those quality properties are incorporated that are preferred by stakeholders and necessary to increase the reuse of software components.

Component-Based Java Legacy Code Refactoring

Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) claims to improve software modularisation and to embed architectural concerns. Refactoring Java legacy code with CBSE in mind requires first assessing the compliance of legacy code with component programming principles. This paper presents a portfolio of rules to assess the compliance of Java legacy code with the Communication Integrity (CI) property, which is one of the major strengths of the CBSE approach. These rules are proposed with the objective of identifying implicit component types and thus provide a measure of the componentisation of an application. In order to help developers and legacy code maintainers when refactoring their applications, along with the rules, this work leads to define a set of refactoring actions. Additionally, the results of testing, comparing and analysing the outputs of refactoring several Java applications are also presented.

Component-based waveform development: the Nucleus tool flow for efficient and portable software defined radio

With the advent of multi-processor systems on chip (MPSoCs) and due to the complexity and variety of modern wireless standards, academia and industry are moving towards software defined radio (SDR) solutions. It is the goal of the SDR approach to allow designers to describe a radio standard or waveform by means of a high level language. This allows faster waveform development cycles and makes it easier to migrate waveforms across different platforms. Out of many software paradigms, component-based software engineering (CBSE) is an attractive match for SDR, especially for baseband applications. It abstracts waveforms in the traditional way algorithm designers think of their applications and guarantees a high degree of portability. However, existing CBSE approaches for SDR have not been able to close the gap between specification and implementation so as to achieve the computational performance and the energy efficiency of handcrafted solutions. The main reason for this gap is that these flows rely on traditional compilers to lower the high level specification to the platform. The work presented in this paper builds on the Nucleus Concept (Ramakrishnan et al., IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM 2009) [28]) in which computationally intensive kernels and their implementation characteristics on the target platform are known. This information allows a tool to close the performance gap, and thus enables efficient component-based SDR development. In this paper we present such a flow and its supporting environment, which includes state-of-the-art tools for system level design. The flow is demonstrated on a MIMO OFDM transceiver.

Component-Specific Usability Testing

This paper presents the results of a meta-analysis carried out on the results of six experiments to support the claim that component-specific usability measures are on average statistically more powerful than overall usability measures when comparing different versions of a part of a system. An increase in test effectiveness implies the need for fewer participants in usability tests that study different versions of a component. Three component-specific measures are presented and analyzed: an objective efficiency measure and two subjective measures, one about the ease-of-use and the other about the users' satisfaction. Whereas the subjective measures are obtained with a questionnaire, the objective efficiency measure is based on the number of user messages received by a component. Besides describing the testing method, this paper also discusses the underlying principles such as layered interaction and multiple negative-feedback loops. The main contribution of the work described is the presentation of component-based usability testing as an alternative for traditional holistic-oriented usability tests. The former is more aligned with the component-based software engineering approach, helping engineers to select the most usable versions of a component.

Towards an empirical method of efficiency testing of system parts: A methodological study

Current usability evaluation methods are essentially holistic in nature. However, engineers that apply a component-based software engineering approach might also be interested in understanding the usability of individual parts of an interactive system. This paper examines the efficiency dimension of usability by describing a method, which engineers can use to test, empirically and objectively, the physical interaction effort to operate components in a single device. The method looks at low-level events, such as button clicks, and attributes the physical effort associated with these interaction events to individual components in the system. This forms the basis for engineers to prioritise their improvement effort. The paper discusses face validity, content validity, criterion validity, and construct validity of the method. The discussion is set within the context of four usability tests, in which 40 users participated to evaluate the efficiency of four different versions of a mobile phone. The results of the study show that the method can provide a valid estimation of the physical interaction event effort users made when interacting with a specific part of a device.

Communication Patterns as Key towards Component-Based Robotics

Vital functions of mobile robots are provided by software and software dominance is still growing. Mastering the software complexity is not only a demanding but also indispensable task towards an operational robot. Nevertheless, well-known and even always needed algorithms are often implemented from scratch over and over again instead of being reused as off-the-shelf components. A major reason is the lack of a framework that allows to compose robotics software out of standardized components without already prescribing a robotics architecture. Whereas Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) is an approach to make a shift from implementation to composition, the general CBSE approach does not give any hints on how to ensure that independently provided components finally fit together as reusable components. This paper introduces a small set of communication patterns as basis for all intercomponent interactions. Since all externally visible interfaces of components are composed out of the same set of communication patterns, these are the key towards a stringent interface semantics. Generic communication patterns enforce decoupling of components and ensure composability by restricting the diversity of interfaces. The SmartSoft framework as one implementation of this approach already proved its adequacy in many projects.

Component-based Development Process and Component Lifecycle

In recent years component-based development has become an established approach. Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE) that deals with the entire lifecycle of component-based products has been focused on technologies related to design and implementation of software components and systems built from software components. The experience has shown that pure technologies alone are not enough. A CBSE approach requires certain changes in development and life cycle processes. However, very few CBSE works, either research or practical, have addressed these topics. This paper describes principle differences of component-based and non- component based processes. Also we give an overview of a case study from a company that applies component-based approach.

An open, component-based information infrastructure for integrated health information networks

A fundamental requirement for achieving continuity of care is the seamless sharing of multimedia clinical information. Different technological approaches can be adopted for enabling the communication and sharing of health record segments. In the context of the emerging global information society, the creation of and access to the integrated electronic health record (I-EHR) of a citizen has been assigned high priority in many countries. This requirement is complementary to an overall requirement for the creation of a health information infrastructure (HII) to support the provision of a variety of health telematics and e-health services. In developing a regional or national HII, the components or building blocks that make up the overall information system ought to be defined and an appropriate component architecture specified. This paper discusses current international priorities and trends in developing the HII. It presents technological challenges and alternative approaches towards the creation of an I-EHR, being the aggregation of health data created during all interactions of an individual with the healthcare system. It also presents results from an ongoing Research and Development (R&D) effort towards the implementation of the HII in HYGEIAnet, the regional health information network of Crete, Greece, using a component-based software engineering approach. Critical design decisions and related trade-offs, involved in the process of component specification and development, are also discussed and the current state of development of an I-EHR service is presented. Finally, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and security issues, which are important for the deployment and use of any I-EHR service, are considered.