Reverse Engineering Activities Research Articles

Design and simulation of a wireline core drilling device for near-shore applications

The PROTEUS project involves the construction of a self-propelled and floating amphibious machine for near shore geological surveys. In this context, the development of a wireline core drilling device was tackled, evolving with respect to existing models and responding to the specificities of the new application. In the preliminary phase, comparative research was carried out both through market research and through reverse engineering activities on core drill models deemed suitable for the purpose, thus identifying the functional priorities and criticalities of the existing material through the ex-post analysis of the subject elements to wear and tear. Once the requirements of the new core drilling device were formalized, the constructive layout was defined, giving priority to functions such as sample management, interlocking and rapid disengagement from the drilling actuation system. The construction details of the mechanical coupling profiles were then optimized by simulation in a multibody software environment, in order to ensure full functionality even in harsh environments, typical of the application, making an advancement with respect to the previously identified reference solutions. Finally, the executive design of the component was carried out by introducing the corrections deriving from the simulation results and considering different solutions in relation to the material adopted and its production needs through machining processes.

Reverse Engineer 5 Degrees of Freedom Robot Arm using Programmable Logic Controller

Many types of robot arms have been developed in the market. Whenever a robot arm broke down, it is a challenge to do reverse engineer and repair the robot arm. This project has successfully reused the existing 5 degrees of freedom robot arm structure and electronic components while replacing the controller with a new Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) and LLD model. The project uses the existing DC servo motor, encoder, sensors, power supply, and interface board. Since the structure and most electronic components are already available, they are important to be analyzed and understood before they can be reused. Hence the reverse engineering activities are needed. In addition, a low-cost PLC is used to save cost. Thus, it is not possible to move all axes at the same time. Instead, the robot arm can only move one axis at a time. Additionally, the robot arm has been improved to be able to be programmed manually or automatically and repeat previously predetermined position sequences. In total, 90 rungs, 96 built-in commands, and custom functions have been used. The refurbished system is very stable and reliable.

Reverse engineering canvas (REC): a visual tool for supporting reverse engineering activities

Reverse engineering canvas (REC): a visual tool for supporting reverse engineering activities

Innovative Methodology for the Identification of the Most Suitable Additive Technology Based on Product Characteristics

This paper reports the study and development case of an innovative application of the Cloud Manufacturing paradigm. Based on the definition of an appropriate web-based application, the infrastructure is able to connect the possible client requests and the relative supply chain product/process development capabilities and then attempt to find the best available solutions. In particular, the main goal of the developed system, called AMSA (Additive Manufacturing Spare parts market Application), is the definition of a common platform to supply different kinds of services that have the following common reference points in the Additive Manufacturing Technologies (DFAM, Design For Additive Manufacturing): product development, prototypes, or small series production and reverse engineering activities to obtain Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models starting from a physical object. The definition of different kinds of services allows satisfying several client needs such as innovative product definition characterized by high performance in terms of stiffness/weight ratio, the possibility of manufacturing small series, such as in the motorsport field, and the possibility of defining CAD models for the obsolete parts for which the geometrical information is missed. The AMSA platform relies on the reconfigurable supply chain that is dynamic, and it depends on the client needs. For example, when the client requires the manufacture of a small series of a component, AMSA allows the technicians to choose the best solutions in terms of delivery time, price, and logistics. Therefore, the suppliers that contribute to the definition of the dynamic supply chain have an important role. For these reasons, the AMSA platform represents an important and innovative tool that is able to link the suppliers to the customers in the best manner in order to obtain services that are characterized by a high-performance level. Therefore, a provisional model has been implemented that allows filtering the technologies according to suitable performance indexes. A specific aspect for which AMSA can be considered unique is related with the given possibility to access Design for Additive Manufacturing Services through the Web in accordance with the possible additive manufacturing technologies.

Improving the Quality of Coffee Shops in Jabodetabek Area by Application and Modification of Coffee Roaster Machine Capacity 400-600 Gram Coffee Beans Using the Reverse Engineering and Engineering Design Method

Coffee roaster machine or commonly called coffee roaster is a tool for cooking coffee beans that have been fermented during the process of cherry coffee into coffee beans in a measured and controlled manner. Coffee shops have constraints in fulfilling the ingredients of the coffee beans themselves by using a roaster coffee machine available at the market less 400 grams or bigger then 1000grams, so that does not match with the needs of the limited ingredients of coffee beans, the coffee shop buys cooked coffee beans at a more expensive price. Therefore, in this research a coffee roaster machine will be designed at the capacity of 400 grams up to 600 grams. Reverse Engineering is a process of analyzing existing products or machine as a reference for designing similar products by minimizing and increasing an excellence product. Reverse Engineering activities have carried out by dismantling and replacing the old coffee roaster. Engineering Designing a new roaster machine, and the last is built a prototype machine. The new design of a roaster machine can produce a faster roasted coffee with the capacity between 400 grams up to 600 grams/77 minutes, in the process of roasting coffee with additional in weight of 200 grams of coffee in a roasted coffee machine after modification.

An extended framework for knowledge modelling and reuse in reverse engineering projects

Reverse engineering is when a real part is analysed in detail in order to create a numerical or virtual model. Reverse engineering allows for multiple redesign possibilities, including changes in the material, the shape and the parameters of the part. Reverse engineering is mostly a manual activity for companies and is thus time consuming. Indeed, measurements must be done in scanned files in order to fit sketches on a mesh and to finally rebuild the computer-aided design/bill of material. This manual process is acceptable when reverse engineering is exceptional. But it is considered as a non-value task when reverse engineering is routine. This non-value task could be automated, at least partially. To make it possible, a capitalization of the company’s part catalogue is a necessary step to proceed. The use of this capitalization can then drive the reverse engineering tasks to enable faster redesign possibilities. The aim of this contribution is thus to propose a knowledge model to support reverse engineering activities in order to integrate the reversed parts quickly into the new product’s detailed design. An extended knowledge framework based on the core product model is proposed, and a use case is shown to validate the feasibility of the proposal of the reverse engineering methodology called PHENIX.

ProMeTA: a taxonomy for program metamodels in program reverse engineering

To support program comprehension, maintenance, and evolution, metamodels are frequently used during program reverse engineering activities to describe and analyze constituents of a program and their relations. Reverse engineering tools often define their own metamodels according to the intended purposes and features. Although each metamodel has its own advantages, its limitations may be addressed by other metamodels. Existing works have evaluated and compared metamodels and tools, but none have considered all the possible characteristics and limitations to provide a comprehensive guideline for classifying, comparing, reusing, and extending program metamodels. To aid practitioners and researchers in classifying, comparing, reusing, and extending program metamodels and their corresponding reverse engineering tools according to the intended goals, we establish a conceptual framework with definitions of program metamodels and related concepts. We confirmed that any reverse engineering activity can be clearly described as a pattern based on the framework from the viewpoint of program metamodels. Then the framework is used to provide a comprehensive taxonomy, named Program Metamodel TAxonomy (ProMeTA), which incorporates newly identified characteristics into those stated in previous works, which were identified via a systematic literature review (SLR) on program metamodels, while keeping the orthogonality of the entire taxonomy. Additionally, we validate the taxonomy in terms of its orthogonality and usefulness through the classification of popular metamodels.

Alternatives to the Knowledge Discovery Metamodel: An Investigation

To better understand and exploit the knowledge necessary to comprehend and evolve an existing system, different models can be extracted from it. Models represent the extracted information at various abstraction levels, and are useful to document, maintain, and reengineer the system. The Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) has been defined by the object management group as a meta-model supporting a large share of reverse engineering activities. Its specification has also been adopted by the ISO in 2012. This paper explores and describes alternative meta-models proposed in the literature to support reverse engineering, program comprehension, and software evolution activities. We focus on the similarity and differences of the alternative meta-models with KDM, trying to understand the potentials of reciprocal information interchange. We describe KDM and other five meta-models, plus their extensions available in the literature and their diffusion in the reverse engineering community. We also investigate the approaches using KDM and the five meta-models. In the paper, we underline the limited reuse of models for reverse engineering, and identify potential directions for future related research, to enhance the existing models and ease the exchange of information among them.

A selection of distinguished papers from the 19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering 2012

ABSTRACTThis special issue contains a selection of distinguished papers from the 19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, held in Kingston, Ontario, Canada on October 15th–18th, 2012. The papers address a variety of topics related to reverse engineering, namely the analysis of execution traces, development of fast and efficient forward static slicing techniques, and mining of software repositories aiming at deriving novel patterns related to reverse engineering activities, such as the migration in Java libraries and the analysis of effects of file editing patterns on source code quality. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A language-independent approach to the extraction of dependencies between source code entities

ContextSoftware networks are directed graphs of static dependencies between source code entities (functions, classes, modules, etc.). These structures can be used to investigate the complexity and evolution of large-scale software systems and to compute metrics associated with software design. The extraction of software networks is also the first step in reverse engineering activities. ObjectiveThe aim of this paper is to present SNEIPL, a novel approach to the extraction of software networks that is based on a language-independent, enriched concrete syntax tree representation of the source code. MethodThe applicability of the approach is demonstrated by the extraction of software networks representing real-world, medium to large software systems written in different languages which belong to different programming paradigms. To investigate the completeness and correctness of the approach, class collaboration networks (CCNs) extracted from real-world Java software systems are compared to CCNs obtained by other tools. Namely, we used Dependency Finder which extracts entity-level dependencies from Java bytecode, and Doxygen which realizes language-independent fuzzy parsing approach to dependency extraction. We also compared SNEIPL to fact extractors present in language-independent reverse engineering tools. ResultsOur approach to dependency extraction is validated on six real-world medium to large-scale software systems written in Java, Modula-2, and Delphi. The results of the comparative analysis involving ten Java software systems show that the networks formed by SNEIPL are highly similar to those formed by Dependency Finder and more precise than the comparable networks formed with the help of Doxygen. Regarding the comparison with language-independent reverse engineering tools, SNEIPL provides both language-independent extraction and representation of fact bases. ConclusionSNEIPL is a language-independent extractor of software networks and consequently enables language-independent network-based analysis of software systems, computation of design software metrics, and extraction of fact bases for reverse engineering activities.

EXPLORING DESIGN IDENTITY THROUGH A “REVERSE ENGINEER AND IMPROVE” VALUES ELICITATION ACTIVITY

This paper presents a 60-90 minute reverse engineering activity that has been used in a variety of contexts to connect design and leadership education and to demonstrate the need for leadership education in effective design work. This activity elicits participant values by having them identify the key design decisions embodied in familiar artefacts, that have been sourced from multiple suppliers who themselves have distinct and recognizable values. Anecdotal observations and trends between sessions of this activity held in different contexts are discussed, alongside an activity plan so that others can replicate the activity.

Stratified sampling of execution traces: Execution phases serving as strata

The understanding of the behavioral aspects of a software system is an important enabler for many reverse engineering activities. The behavior of software is typically represented in the form of execution traces. Traces, however, can be overwhelmingly large. To reduce their size, sampling techniques, especially the ones based on random sampling, have been extensively used. Random sampling, however, may result in samples that are not representative of the original trace. In this paper, we propose a trace sampling technique that not only reduces the size of a trace but also results in a sample that is representative of the original trace by ensuring that the desired characteristics of an execution are distributed similarly in both the sampled and the original trace. Hence, the insights gained from analyzing the sample trace could be extrapolated to the original execution trace. Our approach is based on stratified sampling instead of random sampling and uses the concept of execution phases as strata. We define an execution phase as a part of a trace that represents a specific task of the traced system. We also present an approach for the automatic detection of execution phases from a trace. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our sampling technique through two case studies.

Characterizing the Effects of Learning When Reverse Engineering Multiple Samples of the Same Product

Reverse engineering is the process of extracting information about a product from the product itself. An estimate of the barrier and time to extract information from any product is useful for the original designer and those reverse engineering, as both are affected by reverse engineering activities. The authors have previously presented a set of metrics and parameters to estimate the barrier and time to reverse engineer a product once. This work has laid the foundation for the developments of the current paper, which address the issue of characterizing the reverse engineering time and barrier when multiple samples of the same product are reverse engineered. Frequently in practice, several samples of the same product are reverse engineered to increase accuracy, extract tolerances, or to gather additional information from the product. In this paper, we introduce metrics that (i) characterize learning in the reverse engineering process as additional product samples are evaluated and (ii) estimate the total time to reverse engineer multiple samples of the same product. Additionally, an example of reverse engineering parts from a control valve is introduced to illustrate how to use the newly developed metrics and to serve as empirical validation.

Coupling-based transformations of Z specifications into UML diagrams

Due to their accuracy in describing systems, formal specifications can play an important role during forward as well as reverse engineering activities. However, besides dense mathematical expressions, their lack in visually appealing notations impedes their use and exchange among different stakeholders. One solution to this problem is to enrich the specification by other views, in most cases Unified Modelling Language (UML) diagrams. But the mapping is not trivial, and existing approaches have their impediments, among them the assignment of methods to classes--which has to be re-done by hand quite often. By the example of Z, this paper demonstrates that the situation can be improved. The new approach combines existing mapping strategies, but additionally lets the assignment of methods rest on quality-related measures. The basic idea is to balance the values of coupling for all methods within and between the UML classes. With that, two issues are addressed: firstly, the mapping of sets, types, and operations (to UML classes and UML methods) is based on reproducible measures that are intuitively comprehensible. Secondly, implementations based on the resulting UML class diagrams very likely also have comparable quality-related properties.

Reverse Engineering Java Code to Class Diagram: An Experience Report

Engineering research and industry recognize the need for practical tools to support reverse engineering activities. Most of the well-known CASE-tools nowadays support reverse engineering in some way or other. Reverse engineering is first step towards software Architecture recovery. The most commonly used standard today is Unified Modeling Language to depict the architecture and design of an application. An UML class diagram describes the architecture of object oriented programs. Class diagram captures the essence of its design. Most of the existing systems do not have reliable software architecture and some legacy systems are designed without software architecture design phase. By using reverse engineering tools we can generate class diagram as part of software architecture recovery. In this paper we assess capabilities of software reverse engineering tools to generate class diagram from java source code.

Linkages and technology spillovers in the presence of foreign firms

PurposeThis paper aims to examine production linkage and technology spillovers due to the presence of foreign firms in the Indian pharmaceutical industry.Design/methodology/approachThis study employs the semi‐parametric estimation method suggested by Olley and Pakes to control for unobserved firm heterogeneity that accounts for the endogeneity of input selection with respect to productivity.FindingsThe results suggest that R&D activities of foreign firms lead to positive technology spillover to local firms. However, we also found negative linkage from the activities of foreign firms. The negative linkage could be explained by the large reverse engineering activities that occur on existing drugs in the Indian pharmaceutical industry, where the enclave activities of foreign firms might be a preemptive strategy to reduce the flow of technologies to downstream local firms and to protect their firm‐specific (product) technology.Originality/valueThe results provide support for strong institutional arrangements such as giving protection for Intellectual Property Rights, which might be important for attracting and creating linkages with activities of foreign firms in the host country.

The fundamentals of barriers to reverse engineering and their implementation into mechanical components

Reverse engineering is a common design strategy in industry. It is a term that has come to encompass a large array of engineering and design activities in the literature; however, in its basic form, reverse engineering is simply the process of extracting information about a product from the product itself. Depending on its use, it may or may not be advantageous to utilize a reverse engineering strategy. As with any rational decision, reverse engineering is only favorable when the benefits from its use outweigh the investment. Therefore, a general understanding of the principles that increase the difficulty or investment required to reverse engineer mechanical products would be helpful for everyone affected by reverse engineering activities. In this paper, we articulate and explore these fundamental principles after reviewing examples from the literature and from our own experience. We then use the principles as a basis for the development of a methodology to build barriers to reverse engineering into new products.

A tool for design pattern detection and software architecture reconstruction

It is well known that software maintenance and evolution are expensive activities, both in terms of invested time and money. Reverse engineering activities support the obtainment of abstractions and views from a target system that should help the engineers to maintain, evolve and eventually re-engineer it. Two important tasks pursued by reverse engineering are design pattern detection and software architecture reconstruction, whose main objectives are the identification of the design patterns that have been used in the implementation of a system as well as the generation of views placed at different levels of abstractions, which let the practitioners focus on the overall architecture of the system without worrying about the programming details it has been implemented with. In this context we propose an Eclipse plug-in called MARPLE (Metrics and Architecture Reconstruction Plug-in for Eclipse), which supports both the detection of design patterns and software architecture reconstruction activities through the use of basic elements and metrics that are mechanically extracted from the source code. The development of this platform is mainly based on the exploitation of the Eclipse framework and plug-ins as well as of different Java libraries for data access and graph management and visualization. In this paper we focus our attention on the design pattern detection process.

Methodology for comparison of laser digitizing versus contact systems in dimensional control

The massive acquisition of points in a very short inspection time has converted the scanning with laser triangulation sensors an adequate technology for reverse engineering activities. However, industry is demanding complementary uses for this technology, such as applications in the scope of dimensional measurement control of mechanical parts. A drawback arises in the scope of metrological applications—validity of laser scanning has not been tested in terms of accuracy for geometric and dimensional tolerance control. This paper studies the accuracy that can be achieved with these systems in the field of dimensional control. The methodology includes the comparison of two scanning technologies, laser scanning and contact scanning, considering the latter one as the reference system. The scope of this study is the measurement of surfaces based on canonical features: planes, spheres, cylinders (both outer and inner holes) and conical surfaces (countersink and counterboring holes). For the research, several devices have been designed, which include diverse form features. Reconstruction of surfaces and subsequent comparison with nominal geometry has been carried out using different CAD systems in order to analyze the convergence of results among them. Additionally, this research analyzes several issues that arise when making the comparisons, such as the setting up of a common reference system for the alignment of surfaces or the scanning strategies.

A framework for classifying disassemble/analyse/assemble activities in engineering design education

Disassemble/analyse/assemble (DAA) activities of an artifact pervade many undergraduate engineering courses in the USA as they provide useful 'hands-on' learning components. DAA activities are central to product dissection and reverse engineering activities used by many engineering practitioners as part of their industry's benchmarking and competitive analysis processes. Although the two terms are used interchangeably in the literature and as part of course titles, we argue that they are different activities based on their roles, objectives and outcomes when used in engineering education. This paper presents a classification framework for DAA activities in engineering education that differentiates between product dissection and reverse engineering in the context of the desired educational goals. Relevant examples from existing classes and the literature are presented, and implementation challenges are discussed.