Moving Towards Component Based Software Engineering in Train Control Applications

Abstract: Software industry deals with a vital challenge that is caused by a rapidly growing demand for speedy and cost-effective development of large and complex software systems. To overcome this challenge, software community is moving towards the component based software engineering (CBSE). The major inspiration for software industry, to adopt CBSE as its software development paradigm, is to rapidly build and deploy complex and trustworthy software systems with enormous savings, least engineering effort, cost, and time. CBSE provides the technical facilities that enable the easy assembly and upgrading of the software systems out of independently developed pieces of the software. As the demand for new software increases, software reuse has become an attraction point for the many organizations because in a competitive environment, every organization wants to increase its productivity, reduce the development cost and time to market. Organizations also want to achieve a systematic software reuse in order to ensure a higher reliability, better maintenance and quality by exploiting reusability. Software reuse has become an important objective for every organization that is developing the software systems. CBSE is the systematic approach to achieve the systematic software reuse. The aim of this thesis is to present a precise study of the CBSE advantages, available CBSE lifecycle models in literature, component models, CBSE cost benefits analysis (CBA), and comparison of CBSE economics with another software reuse strategy named as copy paste strategy in the railway industry. This thesis also defines a method to identify the reusable software components from the existing systems. A case study was performed at train control management system (TCMS) supplier organization to define a suitable CBSE lifecycle, a component model for TCMS, and apply the defined method for the identification of reusable software from the existing system in real-time environment. The detailed cost benefits analysis was performed on real data to justify the upfront cost of the CBSE.