Horizontal communication: a style to compose control software
Consumer products become more complex and diverse, integrating functions that were previously available only in separate products. We believe that to build such products efficiently, a compositional approach is required. While this is quite feasible in hardware, we would like to achieve the same in software, especially in the low-level software that drives the hardware. We found this to be possible, but only if we let software components communicate horizontally, exchanging information along software channels that mirror the hardware signal topology. In this paper a concrete protocol implementing this style of control is described and many examples are given of its use. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.
control software diversity composition software components product family product population