Component-oriented Development Research Articles

Reuse in component-based prototyping: an industrial experience report from 15 years of reuse

At Thales Defense Mission Systems, software products first go through an industrial prototyping phase. We elaborate evolutionary prototypes which implement complete business behavior and fulfill functional requirements. We elaborate and evolve our solutions directly with end-users who act as stake-holders in the products’ design. Prototypes also serve as models for the final products development. Because software products in the defense industry are developed over many years, this prototyping phase is crucial. Therefore, reusing software is a high-stakes issue in our activities. Component-oriented development helps us to foster reuse throughout the life cycle of our products. The work presented in this paper stems from 15 years of experience in developing prototypes for the defense industry. We directly reuse component implementations to build new prototypes from existing ones. We reuse component interfaces transparently in multiple prototypes, whatever the underlying implementation solutions. This kind of reuse spans prototypes and final products which are deployed on different execution platforms. We reuse non-component legacy software that we integrate in our component architectures. In this case, we seamlessly augment standard classes with component behavior, while preserving legacy code. In this paper, we present our component programming framework with a focus on component reuse in the context of evolutionary prototyping. We study our prototypes composition through data we extracted from our code repository. On these last 15 years we observe that, in average, our prototypes are composed of 80% reused components. Today, some of our prototypes can be constituted of more than 96% reused components. In this context, we report three reuse scenarios we regularly encounter in our prototyping activity, and that motivates our engineering efforts toward reusable components.

A Model-Based Design Method for the Correlation between Customer Feedback and Technical Design Parameters in the Context of Systems Engineering

Nowadays considering trends such as digitalization, automated driving as well as electric mobility in products in automotive development processes is a major challenge, which has led to an enormous increase in the number of product functions of technical systems. However, the recognized processes in automotive development are strongly component-oriented and such processes partially support the development of product functions. In order to meet future trends and ensure long term customer satisfaction, a transfer from component-oriented to function-oriented development is necessary. Accordingly, a holistic concept can be useful that enables the integration of customer feedback into the early phase of product development in the context of function-orientation. However, the customer feedback evaluation and their mapping with technical subsystems have been considered mainly in the context of component-oriented development. In this contribution, a method is proposed, which is generated in the context of a product model of product generation engineering. Product Generation Engineering enables the structuring of the development process of a product generation and supports function-oriented development. The Product Model provides customer- oriented development of mechatronic products. The proposed method is achieved in the sense of model-based systems engineering and validated by the exemplarily application of a case study of a specific vehicle. Both the past and current product generations of the specific vehicle are taken into account in the development of the subsequent product generation.

A Development Process for Adaptable Services-Oriented Systems

In this work, we present our approach for the Development of adaptable Services-oriented Systems. The process consists of four phases (Preparation, Elaboration, Construction and transition).It is based on the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and component-oriented development process modelling (BPM: Business Process Modelling).We discuss the shortcomings of current solutions for adaptive service-oriented System. To address those shortcomings, we introduce techniques that can be used to build and evolve proactive Services-oriented Systems. The use of those techniques in an integrated way is described along the phases of the service lifecycle. A lightweight WSDL extension of the standard WSDL (Web Service Description Language)is used to describe the service functionalities. The extension is carried out as a metamodel transformation, according to principles and standards recommended by the Model Driven Architecture (MDA).

Evaluation of an Abstract Component Model for Embedded Systems Development

Abstract —Model-driven and component-oriented development is increasingly being used in the development of embedded systems. When combined, both paradigms provide several advantages, such as higher reuse rates, and improved system quality. Performing model-driven and component-oriented development should be accompanied by a component model and a method that prescribes how the component model is used. This article provides an overview on the MARMOT method, which consists of an abstract component model and a methodology for the development of embedded systems. The paper describes a feasibility study that demonstrates MARMOT's capability to alleviate system design, verification, implementation, and reuse. Results indicate that model-driven and component-based development following the MARMOT method outperforms Agile development for embedded systems, leads to maintainable systems, and higher than normal reuse rates. Keywords —Software Development Management, Software Reusability, Modeling

Design of service robots

This article relates our experiences over the last 15 years in the development of robotic applications within the field of service robotics, using the techniques proposed by software engineering. The process began with domain engineering and reference architectures, moved on to component-oriented development, and currently centered on model-driven design. One of the key problems in software development for robotic systems is that the possibilities of reusing software in new applications are frequently limited. This means that we are forced over and over to solve the same problems starting practically from zero every time. The possible causes of this include the following: 1) robotics specialists normally concentrate more on developing algorithms and the way to solve concrete problems than on organizing the software; 2) lack of good standards for the development of robotic software and implementations of these standards; 3) the case studies conducted to demonstrate the viability of software engineering techniques traditionally deal with information management systems; and 4) the robotics community see software engineering not as a solution but as another problem that adds complexity to already complex problems. This research has helped to demonstrate the viability of using software engineering techniques in real industrial applications, albeit using academic tools that cannot readily be accepted by industry.

Systematic Component-Oriented development with Axiomatic Design

A form of design guidance is offered through a process that applies Axiomatic Design Theory to Component-Orientation. Axiomatic Design has been proposed by Do and Suh for object-oriented software development. Our approach leverages divide-and-conquer and find-integrate techniques that support service-based development as an alternative to developing code from scratch. Using this process, missing or conflicting components can be identified, and missing components can be defined. The effectiveness of our proposed system is demonstrated through an example based on High Level Architecture (HLA) simulations. Our Component-Oriented approach utilizing axiomatic design theory has been adapted to HLA Federation Development and Execution Process (FEDEP). As one of the Component-Oriented approaches proposed, FEDEP is able to obtain interoperability and reusability of available components, namely federates.

SOFTWARE METHODOLOGICAL AND TOOL SUPPORT FOR EMBEDDED CONTROL SYSTEMS

The benefits of significant advances in general software engineering support environments in recent years have yet to be realized in the area of embedded control systems, due to a particularly demanding set of requirements. A toolset providing methodological and tool support is presented which addresses specific challenges to system development in the control domain including component-oriented development, reusability, object-oriented design, integration of third-party tools, and validation.

Specifying workflow process requirements for an emergency medical service.

Recent trends in healthcare delivery have led to a gradual shift in the conceptualisation of healthcare information systems towards supporting healthcare processes in a more direct way. The move towards integrated and managed care, which requires designing healthcare processes around patient needs and incorporating efficiency considerations has led to an increased interest in process-oriented healthcare information systems based on workflow technology. This means to actively deliver the tasks to be performed to the right persons at the right time with the necessary information and the application functions needed. Moreover, workflow technology promotes a component-oriented development whereby the process logic is separated from application logic. This paper presents an approach to capturing process logic requirements for healthcare workflow systems with a view to design a system that is easily adjustable to process changes and to evolving organizational structures at a reasonable cost.

Multi-agent systems support for Community-Based Learning

Electronic distributed learning that overlooks the physical and geographic status of learners has become a reality. Moreover, its quality has been considerably improved by utilizing recent advances in web-based technology. Various electronic learning support systems such as Internet-based tutorials and Virtual Universities have appeared in different forms and reflect advances in technology. However, there remains a huge barrier to support the shareable and collaborative learning available through virtual communities. Our solution to these problems was to develop an educational middleware, called the Community-Based Learning (CoBL) framework whose goal is to: (a) adapt to the diverse requirements of learners; (b) support shareable and collaborative learning; and (c) be capable of facilitating distributed learning over the Internet. The CoBL framework is based on: (1) agents to manage individual learners and communities of learners; (2) a shared data model for integrating heterogeneous communities; and (3) a component-oriented development approach. We have implemented the CoBL prototype system and used it for community-based learning.