Design principles, implementation guidelines, evaluation criteria for system openness and flexibility and use case implementations

Executive summary This deliverable documents the work performed by the authors in the context of work package WP7 of the EU project BRICS. The authors of this report all work at the University of Bergamo, which is the partner in BRICS responsible for promoting and supporting the development of Open and Flexible Robotic Systems. WP7 is a cross-sectional work package as Openness and Flexibility are requirements that need to be addressed in every phase of the robotic system development process. Openness and Flexibility are quality factors of the entire robotic system as well as of each of its constituent parts. More specifically, this deliverable covers partially Task 7.1 ―Best Practice in system Openness and flexibility‖, Task 7.2 ―Metrics to evaluate system openness and flexibility‖, and partially Task 7.4 ―Design Principles for system openness and flexibility‖ This deliverable is structured in four main sections: the rest of Section 1 introduces the role of work package WP7 in the BRICS project. Section 2 illustrates background concepts. Section 3 analyses criteria for evaluating software flexibility. Section 4 presents design principles and implementation guidelines.