No.60 Reusability of Software Components in the Vehicular Domain

Component-based software engineering is concerned with enabling software to be assembled through systematic (re)use of carefully built software elements denoted components. In this thesis we describe how reusability benefits of component-based software engineering can be utilized for organizations acting in the vehicular domain. Attractive benefits with this approach include man-aging complexity through an architecture divided in components and avoid-ance of large monolithic structures; reduction of time-to-market since applica-tions ideally can be assembled from pre-existing components; increased quality when applications are built from components already proven in use; and cost amortization through investment payoff by each reuse of a component. Successful deployment of component-based development is however not simple- it depends on many strategic, technical, and business decisions. Fur-thermore the domain of vehicular systems represents a class of systems where component-based principles have had a limited success, in comparison to th