Architecture for Mechatronics Software Systems – A Survey of Related Concepts, Theories and Methods

One promising approach to managing complexity and ensuring qualities of software systems is through software architecture, denoting the science and art of software structuring. In this report, some important concepts, theories, and methods of software architecture from software engineering will be studied. Since these technologies are developed with generic software applications in mind, there is generally a lack of support for many important aspects of embedded computer control, such as timing and constrained resources. This has limited the potential benefits of exploiting architecture-based reasoning in the development of embedded control software. Future research should focus on integrating embedded computer control specific semantics and implementation constraints with these general technologies.