Building Distributed Embedded Systems from Large Software Components

Developers of distributed embedded systems face challenges of high demands on reliability and performance, requirements on lowered product cost, and supporting many configurations, variants and suppliers. Component-based development is a promising software engineering approach to cost efficiently deal with software variability, reusability and maintainability. However, we claim that existing tools and methods do not address problems related to assembling applications based on large and complex commercial off-the-shelf components developed by different vendors and sub contractors. In this paper we present our ongoing work towards a method that deals with integration problems present when assembling large software components into distributed embedded systems. Our approach makes it possible to execute the software from several electronic control units in one electronic control unit which in turn decrease the amount of hardware needed in the system and, also, facilitates large software components to be trade units between different organisations as replacement for electronic control units (hardware components).