Using Aspects and Component Concepts to Improve Reuse of Software for Embedded Systems Product Lines

Embedded systems have several characteristics, such as application specific needs, real-time constraints and intrinsic embedded concerns (i.e. energy consumption), which hinder the reuse of previously developed components as well as their adaptation to provide variability in a software product line. As more applications require embedded system solutions, it is clear that if each time a new application is developed, it is not suitable to develop its supporting embedded system components from scratch. Resulting in an inability of the industry to follow the needs imposed by the market. To cope with this problem, the reuse of components within software product lines is a key issue. It seams to be easy task, but in fact it is not, due to increasing amount functionalities and crosscutting concerns present in those applications. In this paper we present an approach to handle components at a higher abstraction level, whose handling of crosscutting concerns is weaved by system level aspects, in order to address such complexity and also to make it easier the handling of variations in a software product line.