Browsing by Author "Lucena, Vicente Ferreira de"

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    Flexible web-based management of components for industrial automation
    (2002) Lucena, Vicente Ferreira de; Göhner, Peter (Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr. h. c.)
    The development of applications based on elementary components is one of the oldest known engineering approaches. Such a procedure is well practiced, for example, in the hardware electronics industry and has been applied more and more in other domains. In the last years software components have been adopted as a meaningful solution for the construction of larger software applications improving the development productivity and improving the quality of the final products. But the more components that are available the more difficult is the proper management of those components and consequently more difficult is the proper choice of the most suitable one for solving a specific task. This thesis deals with this problem and proposes a systematic way of managing components. How to store components properly is investigated and later on how to find, understand and decide about the reuse of the most appropriate component. This thesis was centered in the industrial automation domain and a study of the most relevant characteristics of that domain was done. There is no common standardized model available for representing software components used in the industrial automation domain mainly because of the great amount of quite different component technologies being used in that domain. In fact, it is not possible to summarize all of them in only one model. The problem faced was to propose a way of constructing a repository able to deal with those technologies together and be able to represent the technical details of each one of them properly. The proposed solution involves a flexible representation for the components that consists of two parts, the first one with the common information for every component technology involved, and the second one where the specificity of each component technology is summarized. Additionally, through the systematic management process proposed, recently developed components are published before being used, and component users are conducted during the search for desired components. A prototypic tool for the management of components was constructed using technologies associated with the Internet. The necessary flexibility of the component management system was obtained through the representation of the specificity of each component technology with the eXtended Markup Language (XML) and associated technologies. In the example presented, different component technologies like JavaBeans and ViPER are successfully managed together.