Object-oriented re-engineering of embedded software

Abstract Embedded computer systems, incorporated in various types of products, are common in many everyday goods, industrial equipment and machine automation systems. Because embedded systems have been developed for several years in the context of certain product domains, but for different customers and based on different technologies, families of embedded systems have emerged in those product domains. Such families need to be constantly re-engineered for developing new systems. Yet, organised reuse of the experiences gained from the development of certain system families is not widespread. In connection with the increased use of object-oriented methodologies in the development of real-time computer systems, better means will be provided for reusable embedded software architectures and components. As a result of the developments in the 1980s, re-engineering for reusability requires in practice the redesign and generalisation of individual structured embedded system models and software implementations as object-oriented models and implementations. However, there is a gap between the results of research on pure object-oriented approaches and their implementation for production use in a re-engineering process of embedded software. A pure object-oriented approach would result in the losing of the straightforward traceability between the re-engineered analysis and design models and the original structured models. Combinative and adaptive object-oriented approaches seem to be reasonable for the re-engineering process, because they incorporate and modify traditional static, dynamic and functional modelling techniques into object-oriented modelling. The reasons for this opinion are justified in this paper using the remodelling of control software of machine automation systems as an example.