It is widely accepted that reverse engineering has three components: restructuring, comprehension and production of formal speciication. In this paper, we advocate that the three components could be achieved in a systematic approach by successfully applying a series of sound rules. The key approach to comprehension and the production of formal speciication is a notion of abstraction. Abstractio...

The paper presents a knowledge-based reverse engineering approach to identify several parametric CAD models from point clouds and manage the relationships between the CAD models. This knowledge intensive process enables designer interaction to capture design intents and to integrate digital data from previous product in a new product lifecycle. The obtained parametric CAD models are easy to cha...

Software must evolve over time or it becomes useless. Much of software production today is involved not in creating wholly new code from scratch but in maintaining and building upon existing code. Much of this code resides in old legacy software systems. Unfortunately, these systems are often poorly documented. Typically, they become more complex and difficult to understand over time. Thus, the...

Reverse engineering (RE) is a research field where physical models are measured or digitized in order to be virtually rebuilt to obtain a CAD model. Today, rebuilt CAD models using current geometrical approaches are generally “frozen” or barely re-usable. This paper deals with a new reverse engineering approach. This one improves the classical geometrical approach with a knowledge extraction ph...

Better understanding manual reverse engineering can make it and any associated systems reengineering more effective. We reverse engineered a version of a system (referred to as "BOS/X") in support of a broader reengineering effort. System reengineering goals and other circumstances dictated a focused, limited duration, manual reverse engineering exercise. This presented an opportunity to study ...

Reverse logistics has gained increasing attention in recent years as a channel for companies to achieve operational excellence. The process involves manipulation of returned materials, or even products, which forms a pivotal role in sustainable development throughout the whole supply chains. To make reverse logistics possible, process re-engineering may need to be carried out. However, the proc...

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is widely used as a high level object oriented specification language. UML is a good target language for the reverse engineering models since it is largely used and offers different diagrams. In this paper we present a novel approach in which reverse engineering is performed using UML as the modeling language used to achieve a representation of the implemente...

Applications of reverse engineering to speeding up a product realization process have gained momentum in recent years. The Internet has found increasingly more applications in manufacturing. Internet-based reverse engineering takes advantage of the recent developments in the above two areas. This paper presents the methodology of Internet-based reverse engineering and a case study will illustra...

Java applets have been used increasingly on web sites to perform client-side processing and provide dynamic content. While many web site analysis tools are available , their focus has been on static HTML content and most ignore applet code completely. This paper presents a system that analyzes and tracks changes in Java ap-plets. The tool extracts information from applet code about classes, met...