An initial performance review of software components for a heterogeneous computing platform

The design of embedded systems is a complex activity that involves a lot of decisions. With high performance demands of present day usage scenarios and software, they often involve energy hungry state-of-the-art computing units. While focusing on power consumption of computing units, the physical properties of software are often ignored. Recently, there has been a growing interest to quantify and model the physical footprint of software (e.g. consumed power, generated heat, execution time, etc.), and a component based approach facilitates methods for describing such properties. Based on these, software architects can make energy-efficient software design solutions. This paper presents power consumption and execution time profiling of a component software that can be allocated on heterogeneous computing units (CPU, GPU, FPGA) of a tracked robot

A Prelimanary Exploration on component based software engineering

Component-based software development (CBD) is a methodology that has been embraced by the software industry to accelerate development, save costs and timelines, minimize testing requirements, and boost quality and output. Compared to the conventional software development approach, this led to the system's development being completed more quickly. By choosing components, identifying systems, and evaluating those systems, CBSE contributes significantly to the software development process. The objective of CBSE is to codify and standardize all disciplines that support CBD-related operations. Analysis of the comparison between component-based and scripting technologies reveals that, in terms of qualitative performance, component-based technologies scale more effectively. Further study and application of CBSE are directly related to the CBD approach's success. This paper explores the introductory concepts and comparative analysis related to component-based software engineering which have been around for a while, but proper adaption of CBSE are still lacking issues are also focused

Strategy Dynamics in Markets of Software Components

In this paper we propose a dynamic model of a software market for component reuse. We investigate the market dynamics using experiments with economically motivated human subjects. Our results suggest that the introduction of the software component market reduces production costs and increases vendor profits. The dynamic interactions in the component market helped vendors coordinate better their production decisions and resulted in production cost savings. The component market can thrive on a balance between competition and cooperation of software vendors. These experimental results could be applied with some modifications to the development of software products in general

Safety component-based approach and its application to ERTMS/ETCS on-board train control system

International audienceSafety-critical software is becoming more and more complex and at the same time it operates in frequently changing environments on which it reacts by reconfiguring its architecture. Thus, an appropriate modelling approach is needed to reduce the complexity of designing and to enable the verification of dynamic reconfiguration behaviour before the deployment at runtime. The paradigm of software component-based engineering provides an essential support for this. However, composing software from many reconfigurable components can lead to a huge number of possible compositional configurations difficult to handle at design time. Moreover, analysing all possible sequences of reconfiguration, including failure situations, is far beyond feasibility without an appropriate abstraction and granularity levels. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical component-based design approach to reduce the complexity of designing and to analyse the dynamic reconfiguration behaviour. We illustrate our approach with a case study derived from ERTMS/ETCS level 2

An Extended Model for Multi-Criteria Software Component Allocation on a Heterogeneous Embedded Platform

A recent development of heterogeneous platforms (i.e. those containing different types of computational units such as multicore CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs) has enabled significant improvements in performance for real-time data processing. This potential, however, is still not fully utilized due to the lack of methods for optimal configuration of software; the allocation of different software components to different computational unit types is crucial for getting the maximal utilization of the platform, but for more complex systems it is difficult to find ad-hoc a good enough or the best configuration. With respect to system and user defined constraints, in this paper we are applying analytical hierarchical process and a genetic algorithm to find feasible, locally optimal solution for allocating software components to computational units

Emulating Home Automation Installations through Component-based Web Technology

The Internet of Things mechanisms enable the management of home environments since they can be developed as IoT based information systems. From standard smart homes to automated buildings, including other kind of domotics and inmotics solutions, every system must be tested and validated before its installation. The current tools offered by IoT and home automation vendors lack in emulation features close to the real behavior of the devices. In many cases, delaying the verification actions until the hardware is acquired and installed may cause some drawbacks, for example, from the economic point of view. This paper presents a solution for emulating home automation environments which are based on the KNX standard and can be represented by architectures of devices. The emulation consist of developing virtual implementations of real devices which operate and communicate through web technology. The technology implementing these virtual devices allows us to develop components which can provide different type of data related to the installation (audio, video, text, animations, images, etc.). The architectures can be managed using web services and their behavior can be tested through web user interfaces showing the mentioned data. Furthermore, virtual and physical devices are connected to validate the interoperability between the real installation and the emulation

A Market-Based Approach to Facilitate the Organizational Adoption of Software Component Reuse Strategies

Despite the theoretical benefits of software component reuse (and the abundance of component-based software development on the vendor side), the adoption of component reuse strategies at the organizational level (on the client side) remains low in practice. According to research, the main barrier to advancing component-based reuse strategies into a robust industrial process is coordination failures between software producers and their customers, which result in high acquisition costs for customers. We introduce a component reuse licensing model and combine it with a dynamic price discovery mechanism to better coordinate producers’ capabilities and customer needs. Using an economic experiment with 28 IT professionals, we investigate the extent to which organizations may be able to leverage component reuse for performance improvements. Our findings suggest that implementing component reuse can assist organizations in addressing the issue of coordination failure with software producers while also lowering acquisition costs. We argue that similar designs can be deployed in practice and deliver benefits to software development in organizations and the software industry

An extensible autonomous reconfiguration framework for complex component-based embedded systems

We present a framework based on constraint satisfaction that adds self-integration capabilities to componentbased embedded systems by identifying correct compositions of the desired components and their dependencies. This not only allows autonomous integration of additional functionality but can also be extended to ensure that the new configuration does not violate any extra-functional requirements, such as safety or security, imposed by the application domain

Toward the adaptation of component-based architectures by model transformation: behind smart user interfaces

Graphical user interfaces are not always developed for remaining static. There are GUIs with the need of implementing some variability mechanisms. Component-based GUIs are an ideal target for incorporating this kind of operations, because they can adapt their functionality at run-time when their structure is updated by adding or removing components or by modifying the relationships between them. Mashup user interfaces are a good example of this type of GUI, and they allow to combine services through the assembly of graphical components. We intend to adapt component based user interfaces for obtaining smart user interfaces. With this goal, our proposal attempts to adapt abstract component-based architectures by using model transformation. Our aim is to generate at run-time a dynamic model transformation, because the rules describing their behavior are not pre set but are selected from a repository depending on the context. The proposal describes an adaptation schema based on model transformation providing a solution to this dynamic transformation. Context information is processed to select at run-time a rule subset from a repository. Selected rules are used to generate, through a higher-order transformation, the dynamic model transformation. This approach has been tested through a case study which applies different repositories to the same architecture and context. Moreover, a web tool has been developed for validation and demonstration of its applicability. The novelty of our proposal arises from the adaptation schema that creates a non pre-set transformation, which enables the dynamic adaptation of component-based architectures