Software Reconfiguration Patterns for Instrumentation Architectures

Abstract

Dynamic reconfiguration in all kinds of applications is absorbing more and more research focus for its demand in automatic measurement system for low-cost products and short time to market. This study proposes a software reconfiguration instrumentation architecture, which is built on component and software data bus models. In the architecture, the measurement system software is viewed as an integration of a set of reusable components, which are modeled with routing workflow for measurement, data process logic for execution of behavioral specifications and a series of communication ports for data exchange with others. The behaviors of the instrumentation system software can be viewed as an integration of components and their interactions and specified in application specification, which is based on routing workflow and independent of component implementation. When the measurement system needs to be reconfigured to adapt to the changing application requirements, the software using the architecture can be easily reconfigured by changing reusable components and their interactions in application specification and reconfiguration can be achieved at the executable code level after the software is implemented. Finally, a reconfigurable measurement platform based on above software architecture for testing engineering signal has been developed and the goal of higher reconfiguration, lower development and maintenance costs are achieved with the proposed architecture.