An Aspect-Oriented Modelling Approach Of Embedded Software Product Line And Its Supporting Tool

Along with the rapid development of processor technology, especially with the adventof multicore processors, a great progress has been made in embedded firmwaredevelopment and embedded software development in recent years. Object OrientedTechnology has become the mainstream in embedded firmware development and embeddedsoftware development. However, there are some problems when we use Object OrientedTechnology to develop and implement software. Firstly, even taking the advantages ofdesign patterns, the symptoms named tangling and scattering between modules can not beeasily solved. Secondly, these symptoms above break the modularization design. So thecodes are hard to understand, maintain, and reuse with different contexts. Thirdly, therequirements segments of a software system are hard to be traced to the implementedcomponents or classes. All those bring about low development efficiency and bad affects onthe reusability and extensibility of the software system.Aspect Oriented Programming provides a better modular mechanism which can solvethose first two problems perfectly than Object Oriented Programming. With regard to thethird problem, Aspect-Oriented Software Development provides a means to keep theconcerns separated throughout the life cycle of software to solve it. AOSD can improve themodularization and build a reusable and scalable software system which is easy tounderstand.Software Product Line Engineering is a paradigm to develop new customizablesoftware applications in large scale by using the existing core assets. It benefits from thestable domain knowledge and the long-term strategy of business. Organizations andcompanies can use it to gain benefits by developing new applications based on a set ofsoftware-intensive systems. Software Product Line Engineering is always termedarchitecture-centric because it relies on common software architecture. The new individualsoftware products are developed in a way that allows taking advantage of heritages ofproduct families and introducing individual characteristics. Software Product LineEngineering can significantly reduce the cost and enhance the customers’ satisfactions so itis usually adopted in the development of embedded systems. However, with the rapidchanges of business rules and the frequency cooperation among different applicationdomains, traditional Software Product Line Engineering can not respond to those rapidchanges. Even organizations which adopt it can not deliver the target software system ontime. A project sponsored by EU is trying to combine Model Driven Development withSoftware Product Line Engineering to improve that embarrassed situation but the results have not been confirmed by a third organizations until now.Due to the software modularization and traceability between requirement andimplement bring by Aspect oriented programming technology, AOSD is adopted in thedevelopment of software product line in our method. In this method, we introduce the ideaof aspect oriented requirement engineering presented by Awais Rashid and improve it, thenproposed a aspect-oriented requirement engineering method in embedded software productline engineering. After a series analysis of domain requirements, we get a set of concernswhich are composed of base concerns and aspects. We also build the mapping between there-organized requirements and the related concerns. Then the user and client visible systemcharacteristics which can be named feature are identified from the concerns set. We alsoclassify and group them. Based on the classification and groups, we give a three levelfeature model. Meanwhile, aspects and the features which the aspect cut cross arecomposed in one model named aspect-feature model. Orthogonal variability model is builtto handle the insufficient variability management of feature model. Feature are recognizedand induced from the concerns collection so that the feature can get a mapping withassociated requirements to ensure separation of concerns. In the end we give a method tobuild reference architecture by using feature model, aspect-feature model, orthogonalvariability model, which can ensure the directed, natural, effective traceability betweenrequirements and implement components. In the abstract, the mapping among requirement,design and implement is built.In order to verify the method proposed in this paper, a portable multimedia productline based on Philips’ Portable Multimedia is analyzed and designed by using the proposedframework.This paper’s work is focused on the domain engineering phase of the embeddedsoftware product line engineering.