A SOA-based Embedded Systems’ Engineering Support Environment (eSESE)

Currently available toolsets for the development of embedded systems adopt traditional architectural styles and do not cover the whole requirements of the development process, with extensibility being the major drawback. In this proposal, a service-oriented architectural framework is defined to provide the infrastructure for the exploitation of service-oriented computing in the development process of embedded systems. The component based as well as the model driven development (MDD) paradigms are exploited to define as web services, features required in the development process. These services are published in the public domain, so as to be used on demand by developers to construct, using their web browser, their projects’ specific integrated development environment (IDE). XML is exploited to define an flexible approach for adopting MDD in the development process of embedded systems. The proposed technology has been already used successfully for the construction of a Service Engineering Environment for developing Process oriented Enterprise Resource Planning systems. Service ontologies are used as platform independent, computer oriented descriptions of services that have standard and formal semantics. This allows services to be discovered, composed into higher order services and ultimately reused. Thus the atomic services layer becomes an important tool of service engineering during service identification, design and reuse.

Software engineering practices such as component-based and model-driven development are already exploited to develop distributed embedded systems. Corfu framework (http://seg.ee.upatras.gr/corfu) [1] and Archimedes System Platform (http://seg.ece.upatras.gr/mim/archimedes.htm) [2] [3] are example systems in the control and automation domain.
Descriptions of ready-to-use software and hardware components required for the model-driven development of embedded devices are already available in the web. Developers have to use their web browsers to search for the specific hardware or software component, since this information is constructed in the current traditional way, i.e., using presentation languages such as HTML. However, this information is very difficult if not impossible to be utilized by integrated development environment (IDEs) to semi-automate the development process.
Technologies of the semantic web, such as OWL, are potential candidates which can be exploited to formalize component descriptions and make them machine-readable so that they can be more easily analyzed by IDEs to assist the developer in the decision making processes involved in embedded system development. Using this technology domain models for devices, device components, software components, etc., can be constructed, and uploaded into the web, so IDEs can utilize them.
On the other hand SOA is emerging as a paradigm for achieving maximum reuse and minimum redundancy of services throughout complex, multiplatform distributed environments. However the number of component models and services evolved over the last years to address the specific requirements of the embedded systems’ development process highlight the difficulties for SOA together with one methodology and one toolset to cover the whole range of embedded systems.

The embedded systems’ developer to effectively address the complex development process requirements wants to pay only for the resources and service actually used to solve the specific problem, which existing monolithic environments do not cover this requirement. The need of an Embedded Systems’ Engineering Support Environment (eSESE), where the requirements of the developer for the development process will have the principal role, is more than evident. The developer, based on these requirements, should be able to set up and customize a project-specific eSESE by easily integrating through plug-and-play the desirable features that should be provided through a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based framework.

Features, required in the development process, such as component type editor, component network editor, system layer editor, implementation model generation, component network verification service, etc., that will exploit semantically annotated component descriptions, are implemented as web services by different vendors and published in the public domain.
The eSESE will provide a powerful and flexible framework for customizing and yet extending the environment to address the developer’s particular needs. The developer instead of buying or developing software components and bind them together to form the development toolset, will construct, through his web browser, the project-specific eSESE as an orchestration of web services that are only used and bound together at the time of use of the particular feature of the eSESE. Developers can also implement their own desirable features and incorporate them into the eSESE framework.

SOA-based embedded systems development,
model driven development,
component based development,
web services,
ontologies,
demand-led develppment process,
project based IDE.

Project Management

experts in component based development

expertise in SOA

 

PROFILE 1
Project management

PROFILE 2
Develop a case study to test the framework, contribute to the project requirements definition.
field tests and demonstration activities

 

Companies, preferably SMEs, involved in embeded systems development

Research Organizations and End Users

Yes