Software Reuse across Robotic Platforms: Limiting the effects of diversity

Robots have diverse capabilities and complex interactions with their environment. Software development for robotic platforms is time consuming due to the complex nature of the tasks to be performed. Such an environment demands sound software engineering practices to produce high quality software. However software engineering in the robotics domain fails to facilitate any significant level of software reuse or portability. This paper identifies the major issues limiting software reuse in the robotics domain. Lack of standardisation, diversity of robotic platforms, and the subtle effects of environmental interaction all contribute to this problem. It is then shown that software components, fuzzy logic, and related techniques can be used together to address this problem. While complete software reuse is not possible, it is demonstrated that significant levels of software reuse can be obtained. Without an acceptable level of reuse or portability, software engineering in the robotics domain will not be able to meet the demands of a rapidly developing field. The work presented in this paper demonstrates a method for supporting software reuse across robotic platforms and hence facilitating improved software engineering practices

An investigation into evolving support for component reuse

It is common in engineering disciplines for new product development to be based on a concept of reuse, i.e. based on a foundation of knowledge and pre-existing components familiar to the discipline's community. In Software Engineering, this concept is known as software reuse. Software reuse is considered essential if higher quality software and reduced development effort are to be achieved. A crucial part of any engineering development is access to tools that aid development. In software engineering this means having software support tools with which to construct software including tools to support effective software reuse. The evolutionary nature of software means that the foundation of knowledge and components on which new products can be developed must reflect the changes occurring in both the software engineering discipline and the domain in which the software is to function. Therefore, effective support tools, including those used in software reuse, must evolve to reflect changes in both software engineering and the varying domains that use software. This thesis contains a survey of the current understanding of software reuse. Software reuse is defined as the use of knowledge and work components of software that already exist in the development of new software. The survey reflects the belief that domain analysis and software tool support are essential in successful software reuse. The focus of the research is an investigation into the effects of a changing domain on the evolution of support for component-based reuse and domain analysis, and on the application of software reuse support methods and tools to another engineering discipline, namely roll design. To broaden understanding of a changing domain on the evolution of support for software reuse and domain analysis, a prototype for a reuse support environment has been developed for roll designers in the steel industry

Design reuse research : a computational perspective

This paper gives an overview of some computer based systems that focus on supporting engineering design reuse. Design reuse is considered here to reflect the utilisation of any knowledge gained from a design activity and not just past designs of artefacts. A design reuse process model, containing three main processes and six knowledge components, is used as a basis to identify the main areas of contribution from the systems. From this it can be concluded that while reuse libraries and design by reuse has received most attention, design for reuse, domain exploration and five of the other knowledge components lack research effort

A design reuse model

The problem with design reuse in engineering practice is the apparent lack of any formal guidelines or approach to help encourage its application and thereby allow designers to effectively benefit from previous domain knowledge. In response to this situation, this paper formalises an approach to reuse in engineering design . The resulting Design Reuse Model consists of processes: design by reuse, domain exploration and design for reuse, and six knowledge-related components: design requirements, sources of domain knowledge, reuse library, domain model, evolved design model and completed design model. The reuse processes are then proposed as the essential aspects of computationally supporting reuse, and as such are used to indicate the failure of existing support to recognise the totality of design reuse

CARDS: A blueprint and environment for domain-specific software reuse

CARDS (Central Archive for Reusable Defense Software) exploits advances in domain analysis and domain modeling to identify, specify, develop, archive, retrieve, understand, and reuse domain-specific software components. An important element of CARDS is to provide visibility into the domain model artifacts produced by, and services provided by, commercial computer-aided software engineering (CASE) technology. The use of commercial CASE technology is important to provide rich, robust support for the varied roles involved in a reuse process. We refer to this kind of use of knowledge representation systems as supporting 'knowledge-based integration.

The software-cycle model for re-engineering and reuse

This paper reports on the progress of a study which will contribute to our ability to perform high-level, component-based programming by describing means to obtain useful components, methods for the configuration and integration of those components, and an underlying economic model of the costs and benefits associated with this approach to reuse. One goal of the study is to develop and demonstrate methods to recover reusable components from domain-specific software through a combination of tools, to perform the identification, extraction, and re-engineering of components, and domain experts, to direct the applications of those tools. A second goal of the study is to enable the reuse of those components by identifying techniques for configuring and recombining the re-engineered software. This component-recovery or software-cycle model addresses not only the selection and re-engineering of components, but also their recombination into new programs. Once a model of reuse activities has been developed, the quantification of the costs and benefits of various reuse options will enable the development of an adaptable economic model of reuse, which is the principal goal of the overall study. This paper reports on the conception of the software-cycle model and on several supporting techniques of software recovery, measurement, and reuse which will lead to the development of the desired economic model

Generating target system specifications from a domain model using CLIPS

The quest for reuse in software engineering is still being pursued and researchers are actively investigating the domain modeling approach to software construction. There are several domain modeling efforts reported in the literature and they all agree that the components that are generated from domain modeling are more conducive to reuse. Once a domain model is created, several target systems can be generated by tailoring the domain model or by evolving the domain model and then tailoring it according to the specified requirements. This paper presents the Evolutionary Domain Life Cycle (EDLC) paradigm in which a domain model is created using multiple views, namely, aggregation hierarchy, generalization/specialization hierarchies, object communication diagrams and state transition diagrams. The architecture of the Knowledge Based Requirements Elicitation Tool (KBRET) which is used to generate target system specifications is also presented. The preliminary version of KBRET is implemented in the C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS)