Abstract
Keywords:
Components, Off-The-Shelves, Real Time Embedded, Reuse, CCM, OSEK.
Abstract:
A general trend in real-time and embedded (RTE) domain is towards complexity. Large, highly integrated, and functionally extensive systems are developed, with an invariant need for costs and time-to-market mitigation. This tendency has set a need for overhauling development methods in the RTE area. Using software Components Off-The-Shelves (COTS) could be an answer to this concern. Effectively, COTS are cheaper, since they are reused several times. They are also safer, since they have been used and validated extensively by different users. However, several major obstacles prevent software COTS usage from spreading in RTE systems development. First, the heterogeneity of components forbids seamless integration. Then, the poorness of components characterization makes it difficult to choose the right component. Last but not least, the absence of COTS usage support tools and methodological guidelines discourages many developers. MERCED (Market Enabler for Retargetable COTS components in Embedded Domain) is a European ITEA research project, which aims at providing solutions to these concerns, and this way, giving an impulse to the emergence of a European software COTS market. This paper outlines the main technical contents of the MERCED project, with a particular focus on the execution framework on top of OSEK, and describes an industrial use case of this technology.