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Large infrastructure systems with a life time of more than 30 years, such as telecommunication or power transmission systems, are difficult to maintain since they suffer from the end-of-life plague of software, hardware and knowledge. Large companies have traditionally tackled this problem successfully, but maybe not with complete efficiency in all cases. We find system evolution to be an increasingly interesting problem as infrastructure becomes more complicated. Our increasingly complex and advanced society demands more of the infrastructure making system evolution an interesting alternative to system replacement. From the point of view of the ISO/IEC 15288 development process we have identified life cycle issues connected to long life time scenarios and the different life cycle stages. In this paper we contribute with a modification of the utilisation and support stage in ISO/IEC 15288 into an evolution stage where a system is not only retired and replaced but rather evolved into the next generation. Using this approach changes the view of system development for this specific type of systems towards a way of incremental development, where new functions can be added at the same time as old legacy parts are replaced with functionally equivalent modules based on new hardware. We have based our solution on the experience from investigations of life cycle issues for two large infrastructure systems.

Management of obsolete software- and hardware-components along with the addition of new components and functionalities in existing embedded systems can be a very difficult or almost impossible task. If there at the same time is a requirement put on the system that it should be in operation for more than 30 years, then the evolution of the embedded system architecture over such a long duration of time will be an even more challenging problem to solve. A large number of different industries, for example the process and power transmission industries, are faced with this type of challenges on a daily basis. The contribution of our research presented in this paper is a set of questions and answers on how it is possible to replace and update an old control system, with examples inherent in process and power transmission applications. We also look at different methods that can be used during the development of new systems such that they will provide a natural support for evolvability, targeting future control system applications.

Handling of obsolete software and/or hardware components together with management of function updates in a complex embedded system with an expected life time of more than 30 years can be a very difficult to almost impossible task. This types of challenges can be found in a large number of companies in, for example, the power transmission industry, power plants, aviation etc. In this paper we present the basic steps in a proposed method for handling evolvability in such embedded systems with long expected life cycles. The key elements of the proposed method are the definition of function dependencies, release planning, and test requirements.

A significant part of industrial systems have requirements on long life times. Such requirements on the complete system impose requirements on its corresponding embedded systems to be operational for an equally long time. As a consequence it is of paramount importance to be able to replace obsolete components of the embedded systems during the life time of the system, and to be able to update part of the design due to new requirements. In this paper we present a method to manage component replacement in such systems, and we present an industrial case study highlighting the work needed to replace an FPGA chip with another, including all corresponding legacy FPGA design challenges that comes with such a replacement. We have found one larger problem inherent in the ability to use the included components in a way that is not possible with the new circuits replacing the old ones. This problem significantly increased the work needed when performing the conversion and migration from the old design to the new, since parts of the design had to be redesigned from a functional perspective.

The use of cloud computing in different application areas is growing fast. More and more functions are being moved into the cloud in order to take advantage of cloud computing strengths such as scalability, resources on demand, and usage based cost models. However, most types of embedded systems are still in an early phase of cloud adoption, with a few exceptions found in e.g., data storage and user interfaces. In this paper we present a number of challenges and opportunities when introducing cloud computing into embedded systems. In particular, we look at embedded systems with requirements on timing predictability, i.e., real-time systems. In the paper we conclude that it is possible to move a complete soft real-time system into the cloud. Moreover we see an upcoming development in cloud computing to potentially allow for hard real-time systems to be moved to the cloud.