REACT: a simple framework for reactive systems

Many systems developed in Philips Research, especially those that serve as demonstrators for research ideas or product proposals developed in the Lifestyle sector, are so-called reactive systems. A reactive system consists of sensors, actuators and a control module. Sensors and actuators are usually realized in hardware while the control module is usually realized in software. The control module decides which actuators to trigger in response to which sensor data. Such systems can be developed much faster, and can be made much more flexible for further modifications, if they are developed using modern software development methods instead of the traditional ones. We propose such a modern framework based on the scripting language Tcl. We show how simple, and still highly flexible, this kind of framework can be. Conclusions: The REACT framework offers a simple and flexible solution to the problem of rapidly developing complex protypes of reactive systems. It was successfully applied in two projects: Emotiotronics and Home Management, to create three demonstrators (Point&Clean, Chameleon and PANDA). The framework allows developers to quickly separate functionality of a complex software/hardware application into components, develop the components in parallel, and quickly integrate them together to the implementation of the application. Unclassified PR-TN 2008/00770  Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. 2008 v