Configuration: a service needed in OROCOS

> In order to prepare the meeting and the project, I now officially
> invite everybody to start thinking about the strategic parts of the
> project. I have some designs I would like to launch during the
> following weeks; other people who have a broad and detailed vision on
> some aspects of the software should also take the opportunity to
> present them for open discussion on the mailinglist.


Dear all,

Just to pick up that call I would like to draw attention to the
important aspect of the interaction of software frameworks and
system architectures.

In our opinion designing a software framework is not only
implementing just another framework. In particular with
respect to robotics we are convinced that such a framework
has to provide structures to tailor module implementations
to fit the system architecture.

I do not believe that it makes sense to state a system
architecture as guideline for a software framework. Rather
I hold the view that there are many patterns needed all
the time in all kinds of architectures. A flexible framework
should support particularly suitable and often needed
patterns.

By designing our framework "SmartSoft" we have divided the
provided patterns into classes like communication services,
module configuration etc. Communication services are further
divided into push and pull services, events etc.

An often neglected aspect in many frameworks for example
concerns module configuration and I would like to stress its
importance. A configuration class for examples allows to
select different activity states based on a finite state automaton.
This automaton can be extended but has to provide a
minimum set of states like error, deactivated etc.
When one wants to deactivate a module at run time,
it is the job of the configuration class within
a module to reach the desired state in an ordered
and safe way. This for example includes cancelling
pending queries of the module etc. Therefore there
is an interference between the configuration class
and other communication mechanisms.

Why do I think that the configuration class is so
important ?

Because it allows a clear semantic for activation and
deactivation of modules which is the key to situation
dependent activities of a complex system. And that is
something needed in every architecture to arrange the
concert of all kind of different modules.


Christian Schlegel



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Christian Schlegel
FAW Ulm (Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing)
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