From low-level programming to full-fledged industrial model-based development: the story of the Rubus Component Model

• Alessio Bucaioni (Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden)
• Federico Ciccozzi (Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden)
• Amleto Di Salle (European University of Rome, Rome, Italy)
• Mikael Sjödin (Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden)

Abstract

Developing distributed real-time systems is a complex task that has historically entailed specialised handcraft. In this paper, we propose a retrospective on the (r)evolutionary changes that led to the transition from low-level programming to industrial full-fledged model-based development embodied by the Rubus Component Model and its underlying tools. We focus on the needs, challenges, and solutions of a 15-year-long evolution of a development approach that has gone from low-level and manual programming to a highly automated environment offering modelling, analysis, and development of vehicular software systems with multi-criticality for deployment on single- and multi-core platforms.

Research questions (RQs)

• RQ1: Which are the publication trends in research on RCM?
• RQ2a: Which were the main requirements that drove the design and development of RCM?
• RQ2b: Which were the main challenges to be tackled for fulfilling the requirements?
• RQ3a: Which were the requirements that triggered the evolution of RCM?
• RQ3b: Which were the challenges to be tackled for evolving RCM?

Pubblication trends (RQ1)

To answer RQ1, we conducted a lightweight literature review to identify the publication trends of this 15-year-long collaboration over time. We collected the data through the web search engine Google Scholar using the following search string:

rubus AND component AND model

We did a full-text search. The RCM was formally defined in 2008 by Häanninen et al. [1], but the first hints on RCM date back to 2003. For this reason, we carried out our search from 2003 to date (December 15, 2022).

The initial search gave 265 results. Then, we removed impurities and duplicates; eventually, we applied the following inclusion and exclusion criteria:

• I1: Studies written in English
• I2: Studies exploiting the Rubus Component Model
• E1: Studies with full-text not available
• E2: Studies in the form of tutorial papers, editorials, reports, etc., since they do not carry the type of information that we seek.

At the end of the process, we obtained a set of 171 primary studies.

References

1. Hänninen, K., Mäki-Turja, J., Nolin, M., Lindberg, M., Lundbäck, J., Lundbäck, K.: The rubus component model for resource onstrained real-time systems. In: IEEE Third International Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems, SIES 2008, Montpellier / La Grande Motte, France, June 11-13, 2008, p. 177–183. IEEE (2008). https://doi.org/10.1109/SIES.2008.4577697