A Systematic Review of Tracing Solutions in Software Product Lines

Software Product Lines are large-scale, multi-unit systems that enable massive, customized production. They consist of a base of reusable artifacts and points of variation that provide the system with flexibility, allowing generating customized products. However, maintaining a system with such complexity and flexibility could be error prone and time consuming. Indeed, any modification (addition, deletion or update) at the level of a product or an artifact would impact other elements. It would therefore be interesting to adopt an efficient and organized traceability solution to maintain the Software Product Line. Still, traceability is not systematically implemented. It is usually set up for specific constraints (e.g. certification requirements), but abandoned in other situations. In order to draw a picture of the actual conditions of traceability solutions in Software Product Lines context, we decided to address a literature review. This review as well as its findings is detailed in the present article.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, 7 table

Software evolution in model-driven product line engineering

New requirements and technology changes lead to continuous changes of the assets comprising a software product line. Since the product line represents a large number of potential products (or already deployed products) in a given domain, managing these changes becomes a key issue when dealing with evolution. We present a framework to support the development and evolution of highquality software product lines. The framework is based on several interrelated models or system views (eg, functionality, variability, quality) and a production plan defined by model transformations that generate a software system that meets both functional and quality requirements. We used our framework to develop a software system for the automotive domain.Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; González Huerta, J.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Ramos Salavert, I. (2012). Software evolution in model-driven product line engineering. Ercim News. 88:41-43. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/46692S41438

Industrial robotics for ERP controlled smart factories

At product manufacturing the time-to-market factor, the profitability and the delivered value define the success of an enterprise. The increasing number of modules in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) programs is a facing problem, when there is a margin between the manufacturing cells and the ERP. Nowadays, the connection between the industrial machines and the ERP is an important requirement especially at automated warehouses and smart factories. Other concerns at manufacturing are the maintenance schedules of the machines, and flexible and easy reconfiguration of the production lines or the production cells. Information technology provides solutions and software environments to implement complex production supervisor ERPs at smart factories. At a production line or an automated warehouse several technical parameters and information can influence the planning of the resources at the enterprise, like maintenance, machine error, stockpile, product ID, defective product ratios, etc. When there is machine maintenance, the company needs to order the service parts, as well as schedule the service time and the stop of the production line. In case of a machine error, the system can estimate the length of the service time from error messages, and reorganize orders, transportation, or even maintenance schedules of other machines. Our plug and play type robot and industrial automation controller project gives a solution for these hardware demanding needs

Investigative Studies Of Embedded Assembly Line Automation System With Dual Rfid Platform

The lack of control and outdated inventory system have increased the management complexity of factory production lines, especially by the increase of sales and demand in the industry. An unmanageable system in the assembly line leads to inefficiency problems in tracking the volume of the product. The objective of this research is to develop a new design of embedded dual RFID architecture (passive and active systems) into a single system to track and monitor the product delivery process at the assembly lines in the industries. A new combination of 2.4 GHz ZigBee-based RFID operating in wireless sensor network platform is proposed as the solution to the product management problem. Meanwhile, the proposed system involved hardware and software designs which were embedded with the passive RFID reader at Ultra High Frequency (UHF). Results from the experiments conducted showed that the embedded system namely Passive and Active RFID (PAR) produced better overall performance compared to the standalone which Passive RFID (PR) system. The indoor range test was measured from 0 up to 60 m distance. The measurements obtained at 1 m and 60 m of transmission range are -33 dB and -51 dB respectively. It was also observed that embedded system has better signal strength value 7.84 % compared to the standalone system at 60 m. For the highest power level, which is level 4 (10 dBm) it is found that only 0.02 dB of signal loss occurred and matches 99.8 % to the theoretical value for PAR system. The throughput values for the embedded are between 12 kbps to 29 kbps for 17 bytes of data per packet. In the latency test, the embedded PAR system has better and therefore lower delay of 10.9 %, 40.6 % and 74.7 % for up to 3 tags compared to the standalone system. Experimental studies using Design of Experiment (DOE) were also developed using factorial and statistical data analysis to validate the eligibility of the proposed system to be applied in industrial environment and requirements. The factorial analysis on the effects on the conveyor speed, product orientation, tag orientation, type of tags, linear distance and type of product materials had been studied in DOE experiments for guidelines to the industry. The percentage of successful product detection indicates a very high prediction at 97.8 %. The proposed path loss model also provides the estimation of wireless distance and number of assembly lines required for establishing an efficient product management system. From the path loss model at distance 10 m the RSSI value for the NLOS indoor environment of assembly line gave -72 dBm

The Design of a Monitoring Application System for The Production of Foam Products Using the UML And Waterfall Methods

The development of information technology, which is followed by a higher level of competition in the foam product industry, encouraging companies to manage their company's resources properly and to plan effective, systematic and mature activities within the company. As a company with a variety of products, the most dominant problem is in the productivity process. Production is the most important part of a manufacturing company, where in carrying out its production activities this company produces based on orders from customers (Job Orders). And the problems that often occur are planning revisions in the midst of production and changing production schedules between groups (lines), delays in production planning in terms of prioritizing planning, and still being done manually in making daily reports. By implementing monitoring, which is the supervision and control of an activity where measurements and evaluations are completed repeatedly from time to time, monitoring is carried out for the purposes of the company and to maintain ongoing management. Monitoring will provide information about the status and trend of production activities towards the company's goals. The solution to this production problem is to build a web-based foam product production monitoring system application using the Waterfall method which is integrated with UML the method used is use case diagrams, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams, class diagrams and component diagrams and software development with PHP and MySQL technology. With Black box testing, it is proven that the design of this foam production monitoring system application can assist the company's foam product production activities in fulfilling customer orders and accurate reports so that it becomes effective and efficient. in improving the productivity and performance of the company

Identifying Extract Class and Extract Method Refactoring Opportunities Through Analysis of Variable Declarations and Uses

For small software systems, with perhaps a few thousand lines of code, software structure is largely an esthetic issue. When software systems grow large, including perhaps a million or more lines of source code, their structures become much more important. Developing a large system requires teams of developers working in concert to provide a finished product in a reasonable amount of time. That means that many people will read each component to use, test or modify towards accomplishing new features. In the software development life cycle, the maintenance phase is a dominant stage that impacts production cost of the system dramatically. This is mainly because, for a successful system, the maintenance phase lasts until the system\u27s retirement and includes crucial operations such as enhancing performance, fixing newly discovered bugs and adopting/expending the software to meet new user requirements. Moreover, a software component may be modified or fixed by someone who is not the original author of that component. In this case, all the operations conducted during maintenance or initial development may lead to insertion of code into a unit that may be unrelated to the original design concept of that unit. As software systems become large and complex they grow too long to read and understand completely by a single person. After their initial implementations, maintenance operations tend to make the system even less maintainable, increasing the time and effort needed for future maintenance. In this research, we are interested in finding ways to successfully detect code defects and propose solutions to increase the overall maintainability of software systems that are larger than any one person can completely comprehend from its code alone. This process of refactoring software impacts the total production cost of the system positively by improving the quality of software code such as its comprehensibility and readability. To reduce the total development cost for a system, we suggest three main re-factorings. These novel forms of refactoring techniques aim to eliminate code defects such as large classes and long methods. The main goal of these re-factorings is to create smaller and cohesive software units with clear intentions to improve the maintainability of software. We provide analysis and visualization tools to help a user identify candidate code fragments to be extracted as separate unites. With these automation tools, developers do not have to manually inspect a foreign code base to detect possible refactoring opportunities. Through the visual representations we provide, one can observe all suggested re-factorings effectively on large scale software systems and decide whether a particular refactoring needs to be applied. To show the effectiveness of our techniques, we also provide some experiments conducted using these tools and techniques both on our own project\u27s source code and other open-source projects

Firefly: Embracing Future Web Technologies

At IPAC/Caltech, we have developed the Firefly web archive and visualization system. Used in production for the last eight years in many missions, Firefly gives the scientist significant capabilities to study data. Firefly provided the first completely web based FITS viewer as well as a growing set of tabular and plotting visualizers. Further, it will be used for the science user interface of the LSST telescope which goes online in 2021. Firefly must meet the needs of archive access and visualization for the 2021 LSST telescope and must serve astronomers beyond the year 2030. Recently, our team has faced the fact that the technology behind Firefly software was becoming obsolete. We were searching for ways to utilize the current breakthroughs in maintaining stability, testability, speed, and reliability of large web applications, which Firefly exemplifies. In the last year, we have ported the Firefly to cutting edge web technologies. Embarking on this massive overhaul is no small feat to say the least. Choosing the technologies that will maintain a forward trajectory in a future development project is always hard and often overwhelming. When a team must port 150,000 lines of code for a production-level product there is little room to make poor choices. This paper will give an overview of the most modern web technologies and lessons learned in our conversion from GWT based system to React/Redux based system

Framework change for modernization of webservice

Software companies that provide Software as a service, constantly seek to improve their product, by adding features according to the customer's needs. In an attempt to meet all the deadlines set by the customer, an important aspect of software development that gets neglected is code maintenance and code modernization, since this is not something that a customer demands of the software. But from a developer's stand point, a good software is one that is easy to work with and easy to maintain. In the long term ignoring code modernization will produce legacy code. Legacy code need not be code that is old, instead it can be code that is written in an outdated language, or has libraries that are no longer vendor supported. Legacy code then leads to different types of technical debt. This inadvertently affects the customer, because as the technical debt of the codebase increases, new feature development or maintenance will become more expensive and time consuming. This was the situation in the chosen case study company. This thesis focuses on studying the different types of technical debt and the possible code modernization methods and strategies that could be applied to a legacy system and possibly reduce technical debt and make the code more maintainable and modern. For this thesis, the modernization process selected is the Chicken Little methodology. This technique allows both the legacy system and the target system to run in parallel by using gateways, and this is an important feature for this project. Especially during the client-testing phase or in the first few months after the new system is taken into production, if there are any issues with the system, customers can be directed to the old system without losing business. In each step of this technique minimal functionality is selected, there by reducing the chance of risk. By following the steps of the chosen methodology to change the framework, the benefits identified were, easier code re-usability and thus code maintainability, reduced lines of code, more unit test cases and many more. Thereafter, concluding the thesis

A real time 3D surface measurement system using projected line patterns.

This thesis is based on a research project to evaluate a quality control system for car component stamping lines. The quality control system measures the abrasion of the stamping tools by measuring the surface of the products. A 3D vision system is developed for the real time online measurement of the product surface. In this thesis, there are three main research themes. First is to produce an industrial application. All the components of this vision system are selected from industrial products and user application software is developed. A rich human machine interface for interaction with the vision system is developed along with a link between the vision system and a control unit which is established for interaction with a production line. The second research theme is to enhance the robustness of the 3D measurement. As an industrial product, this system will be deployed in different factories. It should be robust against environmental uncertainties. For this purpose, a high signal to noise ratio is required with the light pattern being produced by a laser projector. Additionally, multiple height calculation methods and a spatial Kalman filter are proposed for optimal height estimation. The final research theme is to achieve real time 3D measurement. The vision system is expected to be installed on production lines for online quality inspection. A new 3D measurement method is developed. It combines the spatial binary coded method with phase shift methods with a single image needs to be captured.SHRIS (Shanghai Ro-Intelligent System,co.,Ltd.

DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS FOR ASSEMBLY LINE PLANNING -MODULAR SUBSYTEMS FOR A LARGE SCALE PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

In the domain of assembly lines, process sheets are entities that carry assembly process descriptions (work instructions), assembly time estimations, product workspaces and other configuration management and control information. These process sheets get assigned to workstations during the process of assembly line balancing. In this research two tools have been developed to aid in the assembly line planning process. In order to ensure that assembly line workers do not intrude upon each other\u27s workspace, two assembly processes operating on the same product workspace must not be assigned to the same station. Generating and maintaining product workspace information for every process sheet is automated by use of the Product Workspace Identification Tool developed in this research. This tool uses CAD data, custom built analysis software, and web-based databases to define, compute, and store product workspace information. All assembly work instructions must have time studies. These time studies are used primarily in line balancing. Methods Time Measurement (MTM) is a set of charts that provide standard assembly time estimations based on the parts (and their surrounding space) that are being assembled. In the adapted version of MTM that is used for this research, there are twenty-two MTM tables and several pieces of information are required to arrive at an assembly time study. Using the MTM tables to generate assembly time estimates is cumbersome simply because the number of work instructions for a given product can run into the thousands. The MTM estimate generator presented in this thesis provides decision support to the process sheet author by presenting a reduced set of MTM tables and also by performing filtering within the MTM tables. Testing and validation of this tool showed that it has a mapping accuracy of 75%. These two tools are modular subsystems of a large production management system