This thesis is focused on the attributes concept of ProCom, a component model developed within The Progress Centre for Predictable Embedded Software Systems. Attributes are pieces of information of various types and levels of abstraction associated with the ProCom entities during the development of a system. Based on the analysis of the development process envisioned by Progress, the requirements for the attributes of ProCom entities are identified, and various alternatives of realizing attributes are analyzed. The chosen solution of highly structured, multi-valued, and extensible attributes is elaborated. The thesis also consists of the design and the prototype implementation of an attribute framework realizing and proving the feasibility of the proposed concepts. The framework addresses the needs of all actors involved in working with attributes throughout the development of a system: It provides an extensible, modular GUI for viewing and editing possibly highly complex information contained in attributes, an interface for the programmatic access to attributes, and well-defined mechanisms for extending the attribute pool by new attributes, new attribute types, and means for their manipulation. The framework is integrated into the main tool supporting the Progress development, the Progress IDE. / Progress

The notion of maximizing software reuse among the family of products has gained considerable attention in the last decade. Lots of research has been done on designing and managing the commonalities and variabilities between the products. However, very few metrics have been developed to assist architects in designing product line architectures. The structure of the product line holds immense importance towards increasing the life span of the product line. Since many of the product line architecture design methodologies follow a component based approach, it seems logical to attempt to adapt the component based metrics to the product line domain. In this thesis, we attempt to derive metrics that quantify the structural quality of product line architecture. / +92-42-5727639

Model-driven and component-based software engineering have been widely recognized as promising paradigms for development of a wide range of systems. Moreover, in the embedded real-time domain, their combination is believed to be helpful in handling the ever-increasing complexity of such systems design.However, in order for these paradigms and their combination to definitely break through at an industrial level for development of embedded real-time systems, both functional and extra-functional properties need to be addressed at each level of abstraction. This research focuses on the preservation of extra-functional properties. More specifically, the aim is to provide support for easing such preservation throughout the entire development process at different abstraction levels.The main outcome of the research work is a round-trip engineering approach aiding the preservation of extra-functional properties by providing code generators, supporting monitoring and analysis of code execution, and then enabling back-propagation of the results to modelling level. In this way, properties that can only be roughly estimated statically are evaluated against runtime values and this consequently allows to optimize the design models for ensuring preservation of analysed extra-functional properties. Moreover, a solution for managing evolution of computational context in which extra-functional properties are defined by means of validity analysis is provided. Such solution introduces a new language for the description of the computational context in which a given property is provided and/or computed by some analysis, enables detection of changes performed to the context description, and analyses the possible impacts on the extra-functional property values based on a precise representation of differences between previous and current version of the model.

Progress

In this thesis we contribute to the Progress IDE, an integrated development enviroment for real-time embedded systems and more precisely to the REMES toolchain, a set of tools to enabling construction and analysis of embedded system behavior models. The contribution aims to facilitate the formal analysis of behavioral models, so that certain extra-functional properties might be verified during early stages of development. Previous work in the field proposes use of the Priced Timed Automata framework for verification of such properties. The thesis outlines the main points where the current toolchain should be extended in order to allow formal analysis of modeled components. Result of the work is a prototype, which minimizes the manual efforts of system designer by model to model transformations and provides seamless integration with existing tools for formal analysis.

In this thesis we contribute to the Progress IDE, an integrated development enviroment for real-time embedded systems and more precisely to the REMES toolchain, a set of tools to enabling construction and analysis of embedded system behavior models. The contribution aims to facilitate the formal analysis of behavioral models, so that certain extra-functional properties might be verified during early stages of development. Previous work in the field proposes use of the Priced Timed Automata framework for verification of such properties. The thesis outlines the main points where the current toolchain should be extended in order to allow formal analysis of modeled components. Result of the work is a prototype, which minimizes the manual efforts of system designer by model to model transformations and provides seamless integration with existing tools for formal analysis.

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) and model-driven development (MDD) are two approaches for handling software development complexity. In essence, while CBSE focuses on the construction of systems from existing software modules called components; MDD promotes the usage of system models which after a series of transformations result with an implementation of the desired system. Even though they are different, MDD and CBSE are not mutually exclusive. However, there has not been any substantial research about what their similarities and differences are and how they can be combined. In this respect, the main goal of this thesis is to summarize the theoretical background of MDD and CBSE, and to propose and apply a systematic method for their comparison. The method takes into account the different effects that these development paradigms have on a wide range of development aspects. The comparison results are then summarized and analyzed. The thesis also enriches the theoretical discussion with a practical case study comparing CBSE and MDD with respect to ProCom, a component model designed for the development of component-based embedded systems in the vehicular-, automation- and telecommunication domains. The aforementioned comparison method is refined and applied for this purpose. The comparison results are again summarized, analyzed and proposals about future work on ProCom are made.

Protocol designs targeted at a specific network scenario or performance metric appear promising on paper, but the complexity and cost of implementing and tuning a routing protocol from scratch presents a major bottleneck in the protocol design process. A unique framework called 'Orchestra` is proposed in the literature to support the testing and development of novel routing designs. The idea of the Orchestra framework is to create generic and reusable routing functional components which can be combined to create unique protocol designs customized for a specific performance metric or network setting. The first contribution of this thesis is the development of a generic, modular, scalable and extensible architecture of the Orchestra framework. Once the architecture and implementation of the framework is completed, the second contribution of this thesis is the development of functional components and strategies to design and implement routing protocols for delay tolerant networks (DTNs). DTNs are a special type of ad hoc network characterized by intermittent connectivity, long propagation delays and high loss rate. Thus, traditional ad hoc routing approaches cannot be used in DTNs, and special features must be developed for the Orchestra framework to support the design of DTN routing protocols. The component-based architecture of Orchestra can capture a variety of modules that can be used to assemble a routing protocol. However, manually assembling these components may result in suboptimal designs, because it is difficult to determine what the best combination is for a particular set of performance objectives and network characteristics. The third contribution of the thesis addresses this problem. A genetic algorithm based approach to automate the process of routing protocol design is developed and its performance is evaluated in the context of the Orchestra framework. / Master of Science

<p>The main goal of this thesis is to investigate efficient searching mechanisms for searching and retrieving software components across different remote repositories and implement a supporting prototype called “Component Repository Browser” using the plug-in based Eclipse technology for PROGRESS-IDE. The prototype enables users to search the ProCom components and to import the desired components from a remote repository server over different protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, and/or SVN. Several component searching mechanisms and suggestions were studied and examined such as keyword, facet-based search, folksonomy classification, and signature matching, from which we selected keyword search along with facet-based searching technique to help component searchers to efficiently find the desired components from a remote repository.</p>

Reuse is not a new concept in software engineering. Ideas, abstractions, and processes have been reused by programmers since the very early days of software development. In the beginning, since storage media was very expensive, software reuse was basically to serve computers and their mechanical resources, as it substantially conserved memory. When the limitations on physical resources started to diminish, software engineers began to invent reuse approaches to save human resources as well. In addition, as the size and complexity of software systems constantly grow, organized and systematic reuse becomes essential in order to develop those systems in timely and cost-effective fashion. That is one main reason why new technologies and approaches for building software systems, such as object-oriented and component-based development, emerged in the last two or three decades. The focus of this thesis is on software components as building blocks of today's software systems. We consider components as software black boxes whose specification and external behavior are known. We assume that this information can somehow be extracted for each deployed software component. The first and basic assumption then would be the availability of a searchable repository of software components and their external behavioral specifications. Web services are a good example of such components. The most important advantage of software components is that they can be reused repeatedly in building different software systems. Reuse presents challenging problems, one of which is studied in this thesis. This problem, the composition problem, simply is creating a composite component from a collection of available components that, by interacting with each other, provide a requested functionality. When there are a large number of components available to be reused, finding a solution to the composition problem manually would require a considerable time and human effort. This could make the search practically impossible or unwieldy. However, performing the search automatically would save a significant amount of development time, cost and human effort. Solving this problem would be a huge step forward in the component-based software development. In this thesis, we concentrate on a subproblem of the composition problem, composition planning or synthesis, which is defined as finding a collection of useful components from the repository and the necessary communications among them to satisfy a requested functionality. For scalability purposes, we study automatic solutions to composition planning and propose two approaches in this regard. In one, we take advantage of graphs to model the repository, which is the collection of available components along with their behavioral specification. Graph search algorithms and a few composition-specific algorithms are used to find solutions for given component requests. In the other approach, we extend a logical reasoning algorithm and come up with algorithms for solving the composition planning problem. In both approaches we provide algorithms for finding the possibility of a composition, as well as finding the composition itself. We propose different types of composition and show how applying each would impact the behavior of a composite component. We provide the necessary formalism for capturing these types of composition through two different models: interface automata and composition algebra. Interface automata is an automaton-based model for representing the behavior of software components. The other model in this regard is composition algebra, which is an algebraic model based on CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes), CCS (Calculus of Communicating Systems), and interface automata. These formal models are used to validate the results returned by the composition approaches. We also compare the two composition approaches and show why each of them is suitable for specific types of the problem according to the repository attributes. We then evaluate the performance of the reasoning-based approach and provide some experimental results. In these experiments, we study how different attributes of the repository components could impact the performance of the reasoning-based approach in solving the composition planning problem.