Markus P.J. Fromherz, Lara S. Crawford, and Haitham A. Hindi
The remarkable drop in the cost of embedded computing,
sensing, and actuation is creating an explosion in applications for embedded
software. As manufacturers make use of these technologies, they attempt to
reduce complexity and contain cost by modularizing their systems and building
reconfigurable products from simpler but smarter components. Of particular
interest have recently been highly reconfigurable systems, i.e., systems that
can be customized, repaired, and upgraded at a fine level of granularity
throughout their lifetime.
High reconfigurability is putting new demands on the software that is
dynamically calibrating, controlling, and coordinating the operations of the
system's modules. There is much promise in existing software approaches, in
particular in model-based approaches; however, current techniques face a number
of new challenges before they can be embedded in the kind of real-time,
distributed, and dynamic environment found in highly reconfigurable systems.
Here, we discuss challenges, solutions, and lessons learned in the context of a
long-term project at PARC to bring such techniques to a highly reconfigurable
paper path system.
(C) 2005 Springer-Verlag.
For PDF file, send mail to fromherz parc com.