A growing trend in advanced embedded system development is towards customizable and software-intensive products built using open source development tools. This trend is caused partly by the dynamic nature of application environments, the need to reduce development costs, and most importantly, to accommodate the growing demands for functionality and performance made by technically more sophisticated clients and end users (8, 6).

In the military sector, the complexity of systems is growing rapidly to overcome new challenges associated with military operations on urban terrain (MOUT) and asymmetric warfare (1, 2, 4). The requirements of embedded systems, and radar applications in particular, are changing in relation to these new challenges. But added to these difficulties are issues of decentralized development and the mobility of engineering staff. Embedded software development processes used in this field are lagging behind (3, 5, 7), making it difficult for development businesses to deliver advanced systems on time and to maintain these projects efficiently over their often long lifetimes.

This research project is focused on research and development (R&D) projects in which  embedded systems are prototyped. This process is not limited to radar applications, although it is being optimized for use in these projects. The objective of this process is to develop procedures by which the design process of our embedded systems can be performed more efficiently, following a consistent and more formalized approach. This will allow researchers working on current projects to share development knowledge and artifacts more effectively, and for future researchers to better understand and make use of previous projects.

A key aspect in the development of this process is determining a suitable balance between automation, documentation, hardware/software design, and coding -- a balance that is realistic for use by R&D researchers in that the amount of time spend on innovative work is not degraded, but rather performed more efficiently with better results in terms of concepts tested.
 
A creative research methodology is being used to develop, and iteratively refine the process through application in closely monitored case studies. The research findings will be disseminated in-house using seminars, workshops, and the intranet, and externally through publications and the web.

This research project is being carried out by Simon Winberg in collaboration with the parties shown in Table 1.

During the six-month period, July-December 2004, the researcher used the first round of case studies to acquire data relating to ad-hoc techniques employed by a set of developers, each working on separate embedded system projects. The data were analyzed earlier this year and the results of this evaluation are being used to develop a framework that comprises a process document, a directory structure, database, and scripts. Development of the framework is being performed concurrent with testing the revisions in the context of embedded system development projects. This approach allows revisions of the framework to be fed back promptly to individuals using the framework.

Contact Information

If you would like more information on this project, or are interested in participating in this project, please email Simon Winberg using the following address: .

References

1. Crino S. Representation of Urban Operations in Military Models and Simulations. In 2001 Winter Simulation Con- ference. Association of Computing Machinery, 2001.
2. Farkas C, Huhns M. Making Agents Secure on the Semantic Web. IEEE Internet Computing, 6(6):76R79, Nov 2002.
3. Graaf B, Lormans M, Toetenel H. Embedded Software Engineering: The State of the Practice. IEEE Software, 20(6):61R69, Nov 2003.
4. Papadopoulos C, Lindell R, Mehringer J, Hussain A, Govindan R. COSSACK: Coordinated Suppression of Simul- taneous Attacks. In DARPA Information Survivability Conference and Exposition, volume 2, page 94. Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Apr 2003.
5. Taylor Geoffrey R. Moving On: Software Engineering Paradigms of the 21st Century. In Proceedings of the Working Conference on Complex and Dynamic System Architectures. Dec 2001.
6. Theodorou A. What Trends Do We See. (Online) Available from: http://www.aristotechnics.com/articles/99-4.shtml, Jan 1999.
7. VDC. Is the Development Process for Embedded Projects Broken. (Online) Available from: http://www.vdc-corp.com/embedded/press/02/pr02-41.html, Apr 2003.
8. Walters D. New economy - new business models - new approaches. International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management, 34(3-4):219R229, Mar 2004.

---