Over the last years, home service robots have a wide range of potential applications, such as home security, patient caring, cleaning, etc. When developing robot software, one of the main challenges is to build the software architectural model. Software architecture is used throughout the software life-cycle for supporting analysis, guiding development, and acting as a roadmap for designers and implementers. Though many software architectures for robotic systems have been defined, none of them have reached all its objectives due to the great variability among systems behaviors, and still lack of systematic techniques to derive the robot software architecture from its requirements model. In this paper, we present a generic architectural model for home service robots, allowing for software architecture design, and preserving a continuous architectural view all along the development cycle. While avoiding the predominant decomposition problems, our approach allows for integration of the architectural components in a systematic and comprehensive way for efficient maintainability and reusability.
Component based development is recognized now as a powerful tool to manage actual systems’ technological complexity. The success key factor of this discipline is the high level abstracting of systems’ structural and behavioral constituents. On the other hand, enhancing software architectures simplicity and clarity by separating several concerns is a useful technique to manage complexity. In order to have a complete system specification, a rigorous behavior description is needed. Behavioral concepts and their use in architectural specification are in a fast evolution and have become so numerous, so it becomes difficult to elicit and manage them. For these purposes, we present in this paper, a generalized meta-model of behavioral aspects, that indexes the various architectural behavior concepts in classes, in a generic way. To enable more sophisticated and consistent analysis of architecture behavior we have separated behavioral concepts into packages basing on four functional perspectives: interface, static behavior, dynamic behavior, and interaction protocols. We show that our proposed meta-model allows having a general, a unified and an adaptable view of behavioral concepts required in software architecture description from all functional viewpoints.
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