Ideals

The Ideals project aims to develop a software design methodology that realizes the structured composition of software from separate modules, while handling system-wide interacting aspects of a problem domain. The results of the project are essential for the engineering of next generation complex embedded systems.

The anticipated results of the Ideals project are new methods for architecting, analyzing, and implementing systems according to an 'aspect-oriented' philosophy. They lead to a higher level of separation of concerns and a more modular implementation of systems. The proposed methods include the analysis and incremental renovation of existing software systems.

ASML wafer scanners are taken as a case study and act as drivers for the project.

Rationale Ideals project

Evolvability is one the most difficult challenges the high-tech industry is currently facing. The time and effort required to modify and extend a complex embedded systems is typically huge and unpredictable, thereby severely threatening time-to-market constraints. Consequently it is of increasing importance to make systems better evolvable. This is exactly the goal of the Ideals project.

New concepts in an industrial context

The effort and lead time to evolve the embedded control system of software-intensive high-tech systems is typically huge. In the IDEALS project we identified two major causes for this. The first one is concerned with similar code that recurs in many parts of the system, the so-called cross-cutting concerns. The second one is concerned with the lack of effective design abstractions.

The results are published in the Ideals book, that can be downloaded here.

The other Ideals publications can be found on the publications page; search for Ideals