Rob C. van Ommering

CoPAM: a compact-oriented platform architecting method family for product family engineering

In this paper we describe a family of methods that enable the development of product family architectures. These methods have in common that they offer support in developing a family of software-intensive products on the basis of one or more common platforms, that they use component technology to build the platforms and the products, and that they use several well-defined software development processes. The methods differ in many important decisions regarding processes and architecture, which are tuned carefully to the business and organizational context. In this way the method family establishes a significant synergy in the development of several product families in a large and diverse industrial company.

Generating links to background knowledge: a case study using narrative radiology reports

Automatically annotating texts with background information has recently received much attention. We conduct a case study in automatically generating links from narrative radiology reports to Wikipedia. Such links help users understand the medical terminology and thereby increase the value of the reports. Direct applications of existing automatic link generation systems trained on Wikipedia to our radiology data do not yield satisfactory results. Our analysis reveals that medical phrases are often syntactically regular but semantically complicated, e.g., containing multiple concepts or concepts with multiple modifiers. The latter property is the main reason for the failure of existing systems. Based on this observation, we propose an automatic link generation approach that takes into account these properties. We use a sequential labeling approach with syntactic features for anchor text identification in order to exploit syntactic regularities in medical terminology. We combine this with a sub-anchor based approach to target finding, which is aimed at coping with the complex semantic structure of medical phrases. Empirical results show that the proposed system effectively improves the performance over existing systems.

Koala, a Component Model for Consumer Electronics Product Software

We introduce a component model with an architectural description language that helps to manage the growing complexity and diversity of software in consumer electronics products. The model supports flexible instantiation and late binding of components at an absolute minimum of product costs (code size and speed). The model is being used in the production of the next generation of mid to high-end television sets.

Beyond Product Families: Building a Product Population?

Building a large variety of products in a global organization, with software development distributed around the world, requires an approach which must not only have a sound technical basis for handling diversity and commonality, but where also the software development process and organization must be aligned optimally. In our case, the diversity of products is so large that we’d rather speak of a product population than of a product family. We find it helpful to use an approach that emphasizes composition over decomposition, and that embodies different types of processes (architecture, subsystem and product development) that are mapped to development sites in the organization.

Configuration management in component based product populations

The ever-increasing complexity and diversity of consumer products drives the creation of product families (products with many commonalties and few differences) and product populations (products with many commonalties but also with many differences). For the latter, we use an ap proach based on composition of software components, organized in packages. This influences our configuration management approach. We use traditional CM systems for version management and temporary variation, but we rely on our component technology for permanent variation. We also handle build support and distributed development in ways different from the rest of the CM community.

Automatically Correlating Clinical Findings and Body Locations in Radiology Reports Using MedLEE

In this paper, we describe and evaluate a system that extracts clinical findings and body locations from radiology reports and correlates them. The system uses Medical Language Extraction and Encoding System (MedLEE) to map the reports’ free text to structured semantic representations of their content. A lightweight reasoning engine extracts the clinical findings and body locations from MedLEE’s semantic representation and correlates them. Our study is illustrative for research in which existing natural language processing software is embedded in a larger system. We manually created a standard reference based on a corpus of neuro and breast radiology reports. The standard reference was used to evaluate the precision and recall of the proposed system and its modules. Our results indicate that the precision of our system is considerably better than its recall (82.32–91.37% vs. 35.67–45.91%). We conducted an error analysis and discuss here the practical usability of the system given its recall and precision performance.

Languages for formalizing, visualizing and verifying software architectures

In this paper we describe languages for formalizing, visualizing and verifying software architectures. This helps us in solving two related problems: (1) the reconstruction of architectures of existing systems, and (2) the definition and verification of architectures of new systems. We define an expression language for formulating architectural rules, a graph language for visualizing various structures of design, and a dialogue language for interactively exercising the former two languages. We have applied these languages in a number of industrial cases.

Roadmapping a Product Population Architecture

To build product populations, one must combine a top-down product line approach with a bottom-up reusable component approach. This leads to a largely independent development of components that must still be coordinated in the context of the products that will use them. Roadmapping of components and products, i.e. the planning of them in space and in time, is an important element of this coordination. We propose to create both product- and component-centric roadmaps that state mutual dependencies in terms of explicit versions and/or provided and required features. Such descriptions will ultimately lead to a time-dependent description of the architecture. The roadmaps can be specified in XML and published on the intranet, allowing tools to download the various individual roadmaps and check the consistency between them. The work as presented here is partially a formalization of existing practices, and partially a proposal for a new way of working.

Horizontal communication: a style to compose control software

Consumer products become more complex and diverse, integrating functions that were previously available only in separate products. We believe that to build such products efficiently, a compositional approach is required. While this is quite feasible in hardware, we would like to achieve the same in software, especially in the low-level software that drives the hardware. We found this to be possible, but only if we let software components communicate horizontally, exchanging information along software channels that mirror the hardware signal topology. In this paper a concrete protocol implementing this style of control is described and many examples are given of its use.Consumer products become more complex and diverse, integrating functions that were previously available only in separate products. We believe that to build such products efficiently, a compositional approach is required. While this is quite feasible in hardware, we would like to achieve the same in software, especially in the low‐level software that drives the hardware. We found this to be possible, but only if we let software components communicate horizontally, exchanging information along software channels that mirror the hardware signal topology. In this paper a concrete protocol implementing this style of control is described and many examples are given of its use. Copyright

COTS component-based embedded systems – a dream or reality?

Embedded systems cover a range of computer systems from ultra small computer-based devices to large, possibly distributed, systems monitoring and controlling complex processes. COTS-based development in embedded systems, with electronic and mechanical components has a long tradition. However component-based development (CBD) with software components, in particular COTS components, is utilized to a lesser degree. A major reason is the inability of component technologies to cope with specific requirements of embedded systems. In general, component-based technologies do not address timing issues, QoS, dependability, resource constraints, and other extra-functional properties of crucial importance for embedded systems. This raises the question whether Component-based and COTS-based approach is beneficial for development of embedded systems, and which are the specifics to be addressed to make such an approach feasible.