Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Embedded systems cover a range of computer systems from ultra small computer-based devices to large, possibly distributed, systems monitoring and controlling complex processes. COTS-based development in embedded systems, with electronic and mechanical components has a long tradition. However component-based development (CBD) with software components, in particular COTS components, is utilized to a lesser degree. A major reason is the inability of component technologies to cope with specific requirements of embedded systems. In general, component-based technologies do not address timing issues, QoS, dependability, resource constraints, and other extra-functional properties of crucial importance for embedded systems. This raises the question whether Component-based and COTS-based approach is beneficial for development of embedded systems, and which are the specifics to be addressed to make such an approach feasible.

Free software, also known as Open-Source, is a new player in the software world. Though it is mostly popularized by the Linux operating system, it is not limited to it. More and more software applications, tools and libraries are available as free software, for free as well as proprietary platforms. In the COTS business, this raises a host of issues regarding both COTS producers and COTS users, issues that can be technical, economic or legal. From the point of view of producers, it is important to understand where the competition between free and proprietary production of COTS is heading, and what are the natural techno-economic niches for both. From the point of view of COTS-based development, one has to understand issues such as (this list is not limited in any way):

The complexity and heterogeneity of COTS-based software products are increasing rapidly. In contrast to in-house software, COTS components and systems are close entities and, as such, hide many parts of their implementation. Even if this is safe with regard to the principles of encapsulation, high-cohesion and low-coupling, one expects to determine how these external entities may behave in user’s deployment environments which are often different from vendor’s development environments. “Assessment and prediction of behaviors and QoS attributes of COTS software components and systems” means here that if COTS components and systems are not built/prepared for the assessment and the prediction of their properties, they may not be qualified as high-confidence software entities. The proposed workshop mainly stresses the design of COTS software, in other words how to create trustworthy software in order to better instrument, support and organize a COTS software market.

COTS can significantly complicate the independent verification and validation (IV&V) process. The necessarily pessimistic culture of IV&V has a perspective on COTS that greatly differs from a developer’s generally optimistic, success-oriented perspective. For example, there is no basis for assuming that the COTS assessments made by developers will ultimately be consistent or even compatible with those made by an IV&V group. This frequently results in higher project risk and uncertainty. This workshop seeks to illuminate these and other COTS and IV&V related challenges.

This tutorial introduces the legal information that both software developers and COTS purchasers have to consider when buying and selling in the European Union (EU) marketplace. After 1 May 2004, the EU has enlarged up to 25 Member States. In principle this means one legal system but recognizes different Member States rules and legal cultures. Despite the efforts made to unify the regulations, an American COTS product seller whose products are or may be sold in the EU, will find a different legal environment than back at home.

Empirical studies show that the activities conducted while developing COTS-Based Applications (CBA) differ greatly from those conducted while developing non-COTS. The challenges go beyond the need to acquire new expertise and managing uncertainty and volatile risk profiles and demand an entirely new development paradigm. This shift of development paradigm, if not appropriately planned and monitored, can lead an apparently simple CBA development project into disaster.

Image processing techniques are applied in a wide range of products. Automated visual inspection of industrial products, medical imaging or biometric person authentication are only a few examples. In order to process the great amount of data contained in images highly complex and time-consuming algorithms are needed. Furthermore, many of these applications require real-time performance making specific hardware devices indispensable. Currently, there exist several Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) component libraries that help to implement these hybrid software/hardware systems. In addition, some powerful tools are available that allow prototyping and simulating image processing applications prior to their implementation. However, none of these tools allows to realistically coprototype and co-simulate both software and hardware simultaneously. This work presents a new approach to the development of image processing applications that tackles the question of how to fill the gap between design and implementation. A new graphical component-based tool has been implemented that allows building image processing applications from functional and architectural prototyping stages to software/hardware co-simulation and final code generation. Building this tool has been possible thanks to the synergy that arises from the integration of several preexistent software and hardware COTS components and tools.

Properly recording the context factors of empirical results is essential for comparison and integration of results from different studies and for assessing the relevance of a given result to one’s own environment. COTS-based application (CBA) developers need both empirical data and context data for choosing among current and newlyemerging candidate technologies based on solid evidence that they will work cost effectively under the conditions of their particular projects. Previous empirical research on COTS-based development (CBD) has produced various insights on the critical success factors of CBD. Such accumulations also produce various experience/knowledge bases on which the contextualized longitudinal analysis of CBA can be performed. This poster presents an initial contextualized longitudinal analysis of CBA’s by identifying a set of project context factors as contextualizing meta-data which represent the characteristics of the project, process, product, and personnel perspectives of the system being developed. It provides comparative contextualization analysis among different CBA types, and also presents a comparison of two CBA’s from different domains, and then shows how the different contexts lead to different CBA process, products, and economic decisions.

Standardization of the description and delivery of XML-based has opened up a market in ‘commercial off-the-shelf’ (COTS) software components. As a result, standardization efforts are being made towards the assembly of systems from web services where the coordination is defined by   languages. With several potential implementations for many of the tasks within such a system an automated process is required. With many functional equivalents, it is necessary to discriminate between these on the basis of cost and performance.

As governments and enterprises adopt COTS-based information systems, COTS components must be selected to satisfy the security requirements of applied systems. However, the selection of security components is a trade-off between the confidence level in the components and the cost of replacing components. The higher confidence required of the security components leads to a higher cost in the selection process. Particularly, as governments take into account the confidence-level of COTS-based information systems, they must replace security functional components by their own developing components in high security environment. A decision method is needed to solve the trade-off between security and costs. This paper focuses on decision making to solve the problem of replacing the security functional components in COTS-based systems. This paper suggests an appropriate adaptation level and a cost-effective priority to replace security functional components in security environment. To make a cost effective decision on adapting security functional components, we develop a hierarchical model of information security technologies. Based on this, we determine the priority among security functional components using AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process).