UCL Discovery

Abstract

Software reuse in control systems poses a number of challenges, especially regarding non-functional properties. It is often the case when existing software libraries are deployed on a platform with differing characteristics from what was originally targeted for. We present in this paper a pragmatic adaptation approach to dealing with non-functionality variability in software reuse, which provides the ability to specify and validate not just functional but also complex non-functional properties of a software component. The contribution of this paper is as follows; the presented approach allows the specification of self-adaptable components in terms of negotiable non-functional properties (e.g., the response time of a component’s service is equal to or less than x when the available CPU utilization is y on a particular platform z) in an object-oriented fashion – thus even such specifications are reusable/extendable by a more specialized component. We then illustrate the effectiveness of the approach using a component-based middleware framework.