• home
• current students
• graduate
• events

Presenter: Jens Jahnke, University of Victoria
Supervisor:

Date: Fri, March 30, 2001
Time: 13:30:00 - 15:00:00
Place: EOW 230

ABSTRACT

During the last decade, miniaturized computers (micro controllers) programmed with dedicated application software (embedded systems) have replaced conventional electronics in almost every application domain. Although home networking is still in its early stages, it is now considered to be one of the computer industry's hottest markets. The omnipresence of the Internet and the World Wide Web (Web) via phone lines, cable-TV, power lines, and wireless RF devices has created an inexpensive media for telemonitoring and remotely controlling distributed electronic appliances. Traditionally, the emphasize in developing software for embed-ded systems has been on maximizing run-time and memory efficiency to minimize hardware costs as much as possible. In the presence of continuously decreasing hardware costs and the increasing complexity of tasks controlled by embedded systems, additional goals like maintainability and reliability have recently gained importance. Current industrial development practices (processes, tools, and techniques) for software in embedded systems legs far behind the state-of-the-art in normal software engineering areas. Embedded software is typically developed using low-level programming languages like assembler or C a clear design specification and an analysis of architectural requirements. This development practice is inefficient for com-plex systems because it impedes software reuse and maintenance. Moreover, it requires extensive signifi-cant amount of expertise and is prone to error. These problems have begun to become even more severe with the current trend to interconnect embedded systems in net-centric architectures. The great variety of potential benefits of aggregating and connecting embedded systems over the Internet is matched by the cur-rently unsolved problem of how to design, test, maintain, and evolve such heterogeneous, collaborative sys-tems. A component-oriented approach can be used to solve the problems stated above. Recently, the notion of reusable software components has proven extremely useful in several Software Engineering domains. For example, most currently available integrated software development environments provide an extensible library of user interface components to rapidly prototype graphical user interfaces. In the area of embedded control systems, component oriented software development has shown to cut production costs and improve the maintainability of systems.

In this talk, I will discuss component-oriented engineering of embedded software in the light of emerging re-quirements of distributed, net-centric systems. This discussion presents existing component technologies in the framework of a methodology using a high level, graphical specification language (SDL) to formally de-scribe the behavior of components and compose embedded systems networks. In particular, I will address issues arising due to the inherent heterogeneity and dynamicity of net-centric systems.

(This ongoing research is funded by the B.C. Advanced Systems Institute and Intec Automation Inc., Victoria.)