<p>The major problem of robotics research today is that there is a barrier to entry into robotics research. Robot system software is complex and a researcher that wishes to concentrate on one particular problem often needs to learn about details, dependencies and intricacies of the complete system. This is because a robot system needs several different modules that need to communicate and execute in parallel.</p><p>Today there is not much controlled comparisons of algorithms and solutions for a given task, which is the standard scientific method of other sciences. There is also very little sharing between groups and projects, requiring code to be written from scratch over and over again.</p><p>This thesis proposes a general framework for robotics. By examining successful systems and architectures of past and present, yields a number of key properties. Some of these are ease of use, modularity, portability and efficiency. Even though there is much consensus on that the hybrid deliberate/reactive is the best architectural model that the community has produced so far, a framework should not stipulate a specific architecture. Instead the framework should enable the building of different architectures. Such a scheme implies that the modules are seen as common peers and not divided into clients and servers or forced into a set layering.</p><p>Using a standardized middleware such as CORBA, efficient communication can be carried out between different platforms and languages. Middleware also provides network transparency which is valuable in distributed systems. Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE) is an approach that could solve many of the aforementioned problems. It enforces modularity which helps to manage complexity. Components can be developed in isolation, since algorithms are encapsulated in components where only the interfaces need to be known by other users. A complete system can be created by assembling components from different sources.</p><p>Comparisons and sharing can greatly benefit from CBSE. A component-based framework called ORCA has been implemented with the following characteristics. All communication is carried out be either of three communication patterns, query, send and push. Communication is done using CORBA, although most of the CORBA code is hidden for the developer and can in the future be replaced by other mechanisms. Objects are transported between components in the form of the CORBA valuetype.</p><p>A component model is specified that among other things include support for a state-machine. This also handles initialization and sets up communication. Configuration is achieved by the presence of an XML-file per component. A hardware abstraction scheme is specified that basically route the communication patterns right down to the hardware level.</p><p>The framework has been verified by the implementation of a number of working systems. </p>

In dem Beitrag wird zunächst kurz die Funktionalität des Forschungsprototyps cofis.net, einem Informationssystem für Virtuelle Finanzdienstleister, vorgestellt und ein Einblick in seine Entwicklungsgeschichte gewährt. Anschließend wird ein Überblick über die Fachkomponenten des Informationssystems geben. Die Fachkomponenten von cofis.net wurden auf Basis des Memorandums zur Vereinheitlichung der Spezifikation von Fachkomponenten des Arbeitskreises 5.10.3: Komponentenorientierte betriebliche Anwendungssysteme der Gesellschaft für Informatik spezifiziert. Auszüge aus der erstellten Spezifikation werden vorgestellt. Darüber hinaus werden Erfahrungen, die bei der Spezifikation gemacht worden sind, sowie dabei identifizierte Problembe-reiche dargelegt. Abgerundet wird die Fallstudie durch Empfehlungen, die Hinweise zur Weiter-entwicklung des Memorandums beschreiben.

This dissertation explores a new approach to construct tools in the domain of reverse engineering. The approach uses already available software components -- such as off-the-shelf components and integrated development environments -- as building blocks, combining and customizing them programmatically to realize the desired functional and non-functional requirements. This approach can be characterized as component-based tool-building, as opposed to traditional tool-building, which typically develops most of the tool's functionalities from scratch. The dissertation focuses on research tools that are constructed in a university or research lab (and then possibly evaluated in an industrial setting). Often the motivation to build a research tool is a proof-of-concept implementation. Tool-building is a necessary part of research -- but it is a costly one. Traditional approaches to tool building have resulted in tools that have a high degree of custom code and exhibit little reuse. This approach offers the most flexibility, but can be costly and can result in highly idiosyncratic tools that are difficult to use. To compensate for the drawbacks of building tools from scratch, researchers have started to reuse existing functionality, leading towards an approach that leverages components as building blocks. However, this emerging approach is pursued in an ad hoc manner reminiscent of craftsmanship rather than professional engineering. The goal of this dissertation is to advance the current state of component-based tool-building towards a more disciplined, predictable approach. To achieve this goal, the dissertation first summarizes and evaluates relevant tool-building experiences and case studies, and then distills these into practical advice in the form of lessons learned, and a process framework for tool builders to follow. The dissertation uniquely combines two areas, reverse engineering and software components. The former addresses the constructed tool's application domain, the latter forms the foundation of the tool-building approach. Since this dissertation mostly focuses on tools for reverse engineering, a thorough understanding of this application domain is necessary to elicit its requirements. This is accomplished with an in-depth literature survey, which synthesizes five major requirements. The elicited requirements are used as a yardstick for the evaluation of component-based tools and the proposed process framework. There are diverse kinds of software components that can be leveraged for component-based tool building. However, not all of these components are suitable for the proposed tool-building approach. To characterize the kinds of applicable components, the dissertation introduces a taxonomy to classify components. The taxonomy also makes it possible to reason about characteristics of components and how these characteristics affect the construction of tools. This dissertation introduces a catalog of components that are applicable for the proposed tool-building approach in the reverse engineering domain. Furthermore, it provides a detailed account of several case studies that pursue component-based tool-building. Six of these case studies represent the author's own tool-building experiences. They have been performed over a period of five years within the Adoption-Centric Reverse Engineering project at the University of Victoria. These case studies, along with relevant experiences reported by other researchers, constitute a body of valuable tool-building knowledge. This knowledge base provides the foundation for this dissertation's two most important contributions. First, it distills the various experiences -- the author's as well as others -- into ten lessons learned. The lessons cover important requirements for tools as uncovered by the literature survey. Addressing these requirements promises to result in better tools that are more likely to meet the needs of tool users. Second, the dissertation proposes a suitable process framework for component-based tool development that can be instantiated by tool builders. The process framework encodes desirable properties of a process for tool-building, while providing the necessary flexibility to account for the variations of individual tool-building projects.

This thesis investigates the deployment modeling in the scope of Progress,a research vision that aims to tackle the increasing complexity of embedded softwaresystems by adopting a software-component approach. The first phase of the Progress deployment process, which is in the focus of this thesis, defines virtualnodes architecture as an abstraction of target platform devices where componentsare allocated. Based on the Progress development process analysis, the thesis identifiesconcerns that need to be addressed by the ProCom component model to supportthe concepts of virtual nodes and allocation, proposes the extension of the ProCommeta-model and the design of allocation in general. The thesis also provides an implementation of a tool support incorporated into the Eclipse application that forms the basis of the Progress IDE. The implementation,whose main goals are to prove the correctness of the ideas and alleviate the deployment in the IDE, integrates rich graphical editors that support the modelingof virtual platform and allocation of components. / Progress

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.