Component-based System Development Research Articles

Proactive model based testing and evaluation for component-based systems

Embedded software systems are getting more and more complex. The demand for new features and functions led to an increasing complexity in the design and development of these systems. There are frequent reports in the media about software systems crashing and damages occurring due to software errors. One reason for this is that there are many software testing methods and techniques but they are often non-practical and difficult to use. The aim of the study was to improve existing testing methods and their practicality especially from the integrator viewpoint. Component-based system development, components of different granularities must be tested. Furthermore, an optimization approach based on simulated annealing is presented which is used to derive an integration order with respect to the proposed parameters in a powerful and reliable manner. The paper discusses explicit properties and the requirements that are to be verified, imposed upon software-intensive systems by their environment and by their users.

Rigorous development of component-based systems using component metadata and patterns

Abstract In previous work we presented a CSP-based systematic approach that fosters the rigorous design of component-based development. Our approach is strictly defined in terms of composition rules, which are the only permitted way to compose components. These rules guarantee the preservation of properties (particularly deadlock freedom) by construction in component composition. Nevertheless, their application is allowed only under certain conditions whose verification via model checking turned out impracticable even for some simple designs, and particularly those involving cyclic topologies. In this paper, we address the performance of the analysis and present a significantly more efficient alternative to the verification of the rule side conditions, which are improved by carrying out partial verification on component metadata throughout component compositions and by using behavioural patterns. The use of metadata, together with behavioural patterns, demands new composition rules, which allow previous exponential time verifications to be carried out now in linear time. Two case studies (the classical dining philosophers, also used as a running example, and an industrial version of a leadership election algorithm) are presented to illustrate and validate the overall approach.

Fuzzy multi-objective build-or-buy approach for component selection of fault tolerant software system under consensus recovery block scheme with mandatory redundancy in critical modules

During the last two decades, there has been a growing interest in component-based software engineering CBSE both in academia and industry. In component-based system development, it is common to identify software modules first. Once they are identified, we need to select appropriate software components for each module. These components can either be bought as commercial off-the-shelf COTS components and probably adapted to work in the software system or can be developed in-house. This is a 'build-or-buy' decision. This paper discusses a framework that helps a developer to decide whether to buy or to build software components while designing a fault-tolerant modular software system. This paper proposes optimisation models for optimal component selection for a fault-tolerant modular software system under the consensus recovery block scheme. It is necessary to identify critical modules in the design of a fault-tolerant modular software system and also to develop a system with a built in redundancy for critical modules. Therefore, the first optimisation model is developed for optimal component selection with the dual objective of reliability maximisation and cost minimisation of the overall system under the constraints on the delivery time and criticality of modules. The second optimisation model is an extension of the first optimisation model and discusses the issue of compatibility of components of modules. In practice, it is not possible for management to obtain precise value of reliability, cost, delivery time, etc., therefore both the models are formulated as fuzzy multi-objective optimisation models. A case study of developing a manufacturing system for medium-size enterprise is used to illustrate the proposed methodology.

Marco de Componentes con soporte para reemplazo dinámico y seguro en sistemas de tiempo real

In the last decades solutions have been provided for the real- time component-based systems development as a base to increase productivity and reliability of their development as well as their maintenance. Solutions are increasingly appearing that allow controlled flexibility in these systems, aiming to support dynamic execution through the component replacement at run-time. So, component models are adapted trying to minimize conflicts integrating real-time and dynamic behaviors, and achieving components replacements in a bounded time. One of the main challenges for this is to calculate the required times by the different operations needed in a component replacement. The other issue is to know the operating times of the component in the system when their implementations change along the life of the system. In this work the implementation of a component framework implementation is described providing a partial solution for these problems. A component model is provided together with the corresponding algorithms to assure that components can be loaded and replaced at run-time without interfering in their execution deadlines. The model is designed to avoid failures during component replacements. Finally a validation of the presented concepts is provided.

Applying of component system development in object methodology, case study

To create computarization target software as a component system has been a very strong requirement for the last 20 years of software developing. Finally, the architectural components are self-contained units, presenting not only partial and overall system behavior, but also cooperating with each other on the basis of their interfaces. Among others, components have allowed flexible modification of processes the behavior of which is the foundation of components behavior without changing the life of the component system. On the other hand, the component system makes it possible, at design time, to create numerous new connections between components and thus creating modified system behaviors. This all enables the company management to perform, at design time, required behavioral changes of processes in accordance with the requirements of changing production and market.The development of software which is generally referred to as SDP (Software Development Process) contains two directions. The first one, called CBD (Component–Based Development), is dedicated to the development of component–based systems CBS (Component–based System), the second target is the development of software under the influence of SOA (Service–Oriented Architecture). Both directions are equipped with their different development methodologies. The subject of this paper is only the first direction and application of development of component–based systems in its object–oriented methodologies. The requirement of today is to carry out the development of component-based systems in the framework of developed object–oriented methodologies precisely in the way of a dominant style. In some of the known methodologies, however, this development is not completely transparent and is not even recognized as dominant. In some cases, it is corrected by the special meta–integration models of component system development into an object methodology.This paper presents a case study applied to the process management fragment of a human resources HR (Human Resources) domain in a small manufacturing business enterprise, which confirms the success of the meta-model implementation mentioned in the contribution (Mišovič, Faldík, 2013).

Agglomerative Hierarchical Approach for Clustering Components of Similar Reusability

This paper presents a clustering approach for grouping components of similar reusability using an already worked out fuzzy data set [2]. Research has shown that, component based systems development concept benefits the object oriented software development. A Component based system achieves flexibility by clearly separating the stable parts of systems from the specification of their composition. Many software systems contain many similar or even identical components and these components are developed from scratch over and over again which require extra effort. So to minimize the extra effort in developing these components, it is more beneficial to reuse the existing components. To reuse components effectively in Component Based Software Development, it is required to quantify the reusability of components. However it is difficult to use clustering approach to predict reusability. This paper discusses a technique to cluster components of similar reusability together for the purpose of minimizing the efforts of the developer using agglomerative hierarchical clustering. Components attribute affecting the reusability are classified into rules using fuzzy system and are then taken as the inputs to the proposed clustering model.

Risk Assessment Techniques and Survey Method for COTS Components

The Rational Unified Process a software engineering process is gaining popularity nowadays. RUP delivers best software practices for component software Development lifecycle It supports componentbased software development. Risk is involved in every component development phase .neglecting those risks sometimes hampers the software growth and leads to negative outcome. In Order to provide appropriate security and protection levels, identifying various risks is very vital. Therefore Risk identification plays a very crucial role in the component based software development This report addresses incorporation of component based software development cycle into RUP phases ,assess several category of risk encountered in the component based software. It also entails a survey method to identify the risk factor and evaluating the overall severity of the component software development in terms of the risk. Formula for determining risk prevention cost and finding the risk probability is also been included. The overall goal of the paper is to provide a theoretical foundation that facilitates a good understanding of risk in relation to componentbased system development.

Usefulness of acceptance testing information for component-based system maintenance

Component-based system (CBS) development usually involves adapting best-matched components and writing integration code to handle the mismatches between system-to-be needs and available components. CBS presents unique maintenance challenges as a system analyst focuses on integrating existing components to build a software application. The lack of detailed individual component specification has been a key area of concern in CBS development because of its impact on the maintenance phase of a CBS development life cycle. Recent research suggests that the framework for integrated test (Fit) helps to better comprehend systems. In this work, the author presents a study to investigate the usefulness of acceptance test cases (Fit tables) information, when used as a functional specification, during the maintenance process. The mean correct implementation percentage with and without Fit tables were 86.19 and 83.52, respectively. Similarly, the mean times for the Fit tables and without Fit tables were 46.5 and 45.73, respectively. The results show that acceptance test cases help improve the functional correctness of changes with a little more effort during the maintenance process of a CBS.

An industrial study on the importance of software component documentation: A system integratorʼs perspective

Component integration is widely recognized as a process which plays a central role in overall Component Based System (CBS) development. A system integrator focuses on assembling existing components, developed by different parties, to build a software system. The integration process usually involves adapting existing component interfaces and writing new functions to handle the mismatches between stakeholder needs and available component features. The lack of detailed component documentation has been a key area of concern in CBS development due to its profound impact on the integration phase of a CBS development life cycle. In this paper, we report results of an industrial survey conducted among system integrators to understand role of component documentation in the CBS integration phase. The survey investigates whether the presence of component documentation helps a system integrator and its correlations with typical CBS integration success factors. The result reinforces current perceptions of the significance of component documentation in CBS integration. However, the lack of comprehensive component documentation presents a potential risk for a system integrator during integration effort estimation and testing processes.

Mechanisms for Requirements Driven Component Selection and Design Automation

Component selection and design automation play a major role in reducing the system development cost and time due to the ability to accommodate rapid changes in technology advances and the time-to-market constraints imposed on product release. In this article we present our research on partially automating the process of architecture design starting from semantic representations for requirements and components. The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is used for specification and modeling. A set of rules written in Prolog control the processes for model verification and architecture synthesis. This methodology is part of the Requirements-Driven Design Automation (RDDA) framework that we develop for component-based system development.

A formal approach for the specification and verification of trustworthy component-based systems

Abstract Software systems are increasingly becoming ubiquitous affecting the way we experience the world. Embedded software systems, especially those used in smart devices, have become an essential constituent of the technological infrastructure of modern societies. Such systems, in order to be trusted in society, must be proved to be trustworthy. Trustworthiness is a composite non-functional property that implies safety, timeliness, security, availability, and reliability. This paper presents a formal approach for the development of trustworthy component-based systems. The approach involves a formal component model for the specification of component’s structure, functional, and non-functional (trustworthiness) properties, a model transformation technique for the automatic generation of component behavior using the specified structure and restricted by the specified properties, and a unified formal verification method for safety, security, reliability and availability properties using model checking.

Integration of Manipulation, Locomotion, and Communication Intelligent RT Software Components for Mobile Manipulator System Using Scenario Tools in OpenRT Platform

The OpenRT Platform, an integrated development environment for component-based robot system development, is being constructed in order to enhance intelligent robot research and development efficiency. In this paper, a mobile manipulator system that can bring human indicated objects like a service dog is developed based on the OpenRT Platform. The system works with several components providing manipulation, locomotion, and communication functions developed as examples modularizing intelligent robotic functions. These components are integrated using scenario tools in the OpenRT Platform for achieving target tasks.

A type-centric framework for specifying heterogeneous, large-scale, component-oriented, architectures

Maintaining integrity and consistency, and effecting conformance in architectures of large-scale systems require specification and enforcement of many different forms of structural constraints. While type systems have proved effective for enforcing structural constraints in programs and data structures, most architectural modeling frameworks include only weak notions of typing or rely on first order logic constraint languages that have steep learning curves associated with them and that become unwieldy when scaling to large systems. We present the Cadena Architecture Language with Meta-modeling ( CALM) — that uses multi-level type systems to specify and enforce a variety of architectural constraints relevant to the development of large-scale component-based systems. Cadena is a robust and extensible tool that has been used to specify a number of industrial strength component models and applied in multiple industrial research projects on model-driven development and software product lines.

Performance evaluation of Fractal component-based systems

Component-based system development is now a well accepted design approach in software engineering. Numerous component models have been proposed, and for most of them, specific software tools allow building component-based systems (CBS). Although these tools perform several checks on the built system, few of them provide formal verification of behavioural properties nor performance evaluation of the resulting system. In this context, we have developed a general method associating to a CBS, a formal model, based on stochastic well formed nets, a class of high-level Petri nets, allowing qualitative behavioural analysis together with performance evaluation of this CBS. The definition of the model heavily depends on the (run time) component model used to describe the CBS. In this paper, we instantiate our method to Fractal CBS and its reference Java implementation Julia. The method starts from the Fractal architectural description of a system and defines rules to systematically generate element models of the CBS and their interactions. We then apply a structured method for both qualitative and performance analysis, taking into account the given implementation of the Fractal model. The main interest of our method is to take advantage of the compositional definition of such systems to carry out an efficient analysis. The paper concentrates on performance evaluation and presents our method step by step with an illustrative example.

A Contract-based Approach to Specifying and Verifying Safety Critical Systems

Light-weight formal method has been regarded as an important approach to development of component-based safety critical systems. The paper proposes an approach which can formally specify and verify the contract of static structure, dynamic behavior and refinement of component systems based on UML 2.0 superstructure. As results, the correctness of static contract can be obtained via type checking of interfaces and connectors. Dynamic contract can be verified through determining the cooperativeness of integrated components, whose contracts are depicted with interface protocol state machines and their semantics models, namely contract automata. The refinement relation between high level component and its implementation will be guaranteed through defining the alternating simulation between contract automata of components at different levels.

WEAVING DEPLOYMENT ASPECTS INTO DOMAIN-SPECIFIC MODELS

Domain-specific models increase the level of abstraction used to develop large-scale component-based systems. Model-driven development (MDD) approaches (e.g., Model-Integrated Computing and Model-Driven Architecture) emphasize the use of models at all stages of system development. Decomposing problems using MDD approaches may result in a separation of the artifacts in a way that impedes comprehension. For example, a single concern (such as deployment of a distributed system) may crosscut different orthogonal activities (such as component specification, interaction, packaging and planning). To keep track of all entities associated with a component, and to ensure that the constraints for the system as a whole are not violated, a purely model-driven approach imposes extra effort, thereby negating some of the benefits of MDD. This paper provides three contributions to the study of applying aspect-oriented techniques to address the crosscutting challenges of model-driven component-based distributed systems development. First, we identify the sources of crosscutting concerns that typically arise in model-driven development of component-based systems. Second, we describe how aspect-oriented model weaving helps modularize these crosscutting concerns using model transformations. Third, we describe how we have applied model weaving using a tool called the Constraint-Specification Aspect Weaver (C-SAW) in the context of the Platform-Independent Component Modeling Language (PICML), which is a domain-specific modeling language for developing component-based systems. A case study of a joint-emergency response system is presented to express the challenges in modeling a typical distributed system. Our experience shows that model weaving is an effective and scalable technique for dealing with crosscutting aspects of component-based systems development.

Applying model-driven development to distributed real-time and embedded avionics systems

Model-Driven Development (MDD) is an emerging paradigm that uses Domain-Specific Modelling Languages (DSMLs) to provide 'correct-by-construction' capabilities for many software development activities. This paper describes a MDD tool suite called Component Synthesis using Model-Integrated Computing (CoSMIC), a collection of DSMLs that support the development, configuration, deployment, and validation of component-based DRE systems. We also describe how we have applied CoSMIC to an avionics mission computing application to resolve key component-based DRE system development challenges. Our results show that the design-, deployment- and Quality Assurance (QA)-time capabilities provided by CoSMIC help to eliminate key complexities associated with development of QoS-enabled component middleware applications.

Is the wireless industry ready for component based system development?

magine, if you will, the following scenario: You are a communications systems engineer responsible for the creation of a subsystem for a new wireless product. This subsystem will include all of the hardware and software necessary to support the physical, data link, and network layer processing for the new product, and toward that end marketing and the system architect have provided you with one or more waveform specifications defining these layers, as well as your budget for size, weight, power, and unit cost. You begin your task by working with your waveform development team to create a component model detailing the various processing and control blocks required to support each waveform specification. This model is built using an integrated development environment (IDE) hosting a library of industry-standard component definitions, with each component in the library parameterized to allow it to be optimized for a specific application. Key elements of the component models are the use cases defining the functional operation of the processing and control blocks supporting the various modes of operation for the target waveform, and the associated system sequence diagrams illustrating the required interactions between components to meet the overall waveform requirements. For those components that are not available in the library, you generate a new component model from a defined selection of industry-standard component primitives. Once the prototype component models are complete,

A Common Criteria Based Approach for COTS Component Selection.

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) endeavors to enable software developers to develop quality software systems with less time and resources than traditional development approaches. Software components must be identified and evaluated in order to determine if they provide required functionality for systems being developed. Consideration of security requirements for component selection is of interest. This research considers how the Common Criteria (CC), an internationally recognized standard for security requirements definition and security assessment of IT systems, can be applied towards the development of component-based systems. A CCbased COTS component selection process is proposed which integrates activities of the CC for security requirements specification and evaluation. Research questions are presented for the evaluation of the process to establish its value for COTS component selection as well as to identify areas for improvement.

Exception handling in the development of dependable component-based systems

Exception handling is a structuring technique that facilitates the design of software systems by encapsulating the process of error recovery. In this paper, we present a systematic approach for incorporating exceptional behaviour in the development of component-based software. The premise of our approach is that components alone do not provide the appropriate means to deal with exceptional behaviour in an effective manner, hence the need to consider the notion of collaborations for capturing the interactive behaviour between components when error recovery involves more than one component. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated in terms of the mining control system case study. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.