The workgroup “Software engineering” has set as its objective to ensure the necessary quality assurance and coordination for the development of software in the SFB’s various subprojects (see Figure “Overview Tool Chain” (Overview_Werkzeuge)). To this end it has considered the procedure models, the employed techniques and the software integration, and where necessary has coordinated the work of individual projects.
A survey was carried out and documented in order to establish the current situation and serve as the basis for the activities of this workgroup. This survey recorded which methods and tools were being used. One consequence of the results from this survey was the compilation of a record of all the interfaces between the individual subprojects and a Roadmap to adjust the interfaces between the methods, tools, and platforms. On the basis of these interfaces tool chains for the development of the demonstrators of the SFB were identified on different hierarchy levels (MFM, AMS, VMS).
In cooperation with the other working groups the development of interfaces between the demonstrators was coordinated and the abidance of quality guidelines assured. Besides the current statutes of the architecture and communication behavior was documented.
The implementation of the extended functionality for s.o. in the demonstrators is mainly based on software. Since the main focus of workgroup 3 is to ensure the quality assurance and the coordination of the developed software in the SFB 614, additional meetings with workgroup 4 took place. The common results were published in the book "Selbstoptimierende Systeme des Maschinenbaus -- Definitionen, Anwendungen, Konzepte".
Since only few subprojects possessed experience in using the modeling language UML, we offered a UML and MechatronicUML course, with examples in Fujaba and in the Fujaba Real-Time Tool Suite.
The intended integration of the s.o. demonstrators to one overall s.o. system will significantly rise the portion of the software to be developed, which results in higher demand for co-ordination. Therefore the developed procedures of the subprojects B1, B2, B3 are used and evaluated to develop the linked demonstrators. The working group is discussing and combining the procedures developed in the SFB, in order to deal with software related aspects of the "vicious circle of self-optimization". This will be done in cooperation with workgroup 4. The "vicious circle of self-optimization" designates the negative feedback of behavior adaption over several function modules, where the individual module demands increasingly rise, what prevents the desired behavior adaption.
