Views on Evolvability of Embedded Systems / Edition 1

by Pierre Van de Laar, Teade Punter

Overview

Evolvability, the ability to respond effectively to change, represents a major challenge to today's high-end embedded systems, such as those developed in the medical domain by Philips Healthcare. These systems are typically developed by multi-disciplinary teams, located around the world, and are in constant need of upgrading to provide new advanced features, to deal with obsolescence, and to exploit emerging enabling technologies. Despite the importance of evolvability for these types of systems, the field has received scant attention from the scientific and engineering communities.

Views on Evolvability of Embedded Systems focuses on the topic of evolvability of embedded systems from an applied scientific perspective. In particular, the book describes results from the Darwin project that researched evolvability in the context of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) systems. This project applied the Industry-as-Laboratory paradigm, in which industry and academia join forces to ensure continuous knowledge and technology transfer during the project’s lifetime. The Darwin project was a collaboration between the Embedded Systems Institute, the MRI business unit of Philips Healthcare, Philips Research, and five Dutch universities.

Evolvability was addressed from a system engineering perspective by a number of researchers from different disciplines such as software-, electrical- and mechanical engineering, with a clear focus on economic decision making. The research focused on four areas: data mining, reference architectures, mechanisms and patterns for evolvability, in particular visualization & modelling, and economic decision making. Views on Evolvability of Embedded Systems is targeted at both researchers and practitioners; they will not only find a state-of-the-art overview on evolvability research, but also guidelines to make systems more evolvable and new industrially-validated techniques to improve the evolvability of embeddedsystems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789048198481
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	10/28/2010
Series:	Embedded Systems
Edition description:	2011
Pages:	316
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.24(d)

About the Author

Piërre van de Laar studied at the Catholic University of Nijmegen and was awarded his master degree (cum laude) in both theoretical and computational physics in 1994 and his PhD on 'Selection in Neural Information Processing' in 1999. He was a senior researcher at Philips Research in Eindhoven. Since 2006, he is a Research Fellow of the Embedded Systems Institute. After performing a study for DaimlerChrysler, he joined the Darwin project.

Teade Punter received a M.Sc (Ir.) from University of Twente in 1991 and a Ph.D. from Eindhoven University of Technology in 2001. He worked at the Open University of the Netherlands, Kema Nederland B.V., Fraunhofer IESE and Eindhoven University of Technology. He has dealt with a variety of topics in software and systems engineering, e.g., software measurement and assessment. Teade is a Knowledge Manager at ESI for multiple projects, including the Darwin project. Teade’s interests are in model driven engineering, integration & test and technology transfer.

Table of Contents

1 Researching Evolvability Piërre van de Laar Alexander U. Douglas Pierre America 1

2 Architecting for Improved Evolvability Pierre America Piërre van de Laar Gerrit Muller Teade Punter Nico van Rooijen Joland Rutgers David Watts 21

3 Complementing Software Documentation Pieter van der Spek Steven Klusener Piërre van de Laar 37

4 Identifying and Investigating Evolution Type Decomposition Weaknesses Adam Vanya Steven Klusener Rahul Premraj Nico van Rooijen Hans van Vliet 53

5 Transferring Evolutionary Couplings to Industry Piërre van de Laar 69

6 An Execution Viewpoint Catalog for Software-Intensive and Embedded Systems Trosky B. Callo Arias 89

7 Researching Reference Architectures Gerrit Muller Piërre van de Laar 107

8 A3 Architecture Overviews P. Daniel Borches 121

9 Linking Requirements and Implementation Alexander U. Douglas 137

10 Workflow Modelling of Intended System Use Thom van Beek Tetsuo Tomiyama 153

11 Supervisory Control Synthesis in the Medical Domain R.J.M. Theunissen R.R.H. Schiffelers D.A. van Beek J.E. Rooda 171

12 Creating High-Quality Behavioural Designs for Software-Intensive Systems Gürcan Gülesir Pierre America Frank Benschop Klaas van den Berg Mehmet Aksit 193

13 Verifying Runtime Reconfiguration Requirements on UML Models Selim Ciraci Pim van den Broek Mehmet Aksit 209

14 Scheduling in MRI Scans processing Evgeniy N. Ivanov Alexander Y. Pogromsky Johan S. van den Brink Jacobus E. Rooda 227

15 Strategy-Focused Architecture Decision Making Ana Ivanovic Pierre America 245

16 Balancing Time-to-Market and Quality in Evolving Embedded Systems Pieter van der Spek Chris Verhoef 261

17 Industrial Impact and Lessons Learned Teade Punter Piërre van de Laar 279

18 Conclusions Piërre van de Laar Pierre America Nico van Rooijen Teade Punter David Watts 301

Annex

I Darwin Publications 307

II List of Darwin Partners 311

Index 313

Editorial Reviews

'We were shown the benefits of modeling and visualization and how these could be actively used to move us towards a “right-by-design” way of working' Fons Gijselhart (Vice President Philips Healthcare MRI Systems)

From the Publisher