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Software component technologies have not yet been generally accepted by embedded-systems industries. In order to better understand why this is the case, we present a set of requirements, based on industrial needs, that are deemed decisive for introducing a component technology. The requirements we present can be used to evaluate existing component technologies before introducing them in an industrial context. They can also be used to guide modifications and/or extensions to component technologies, to make them better suited for industrial deployment. One of our findings is that a major source of requirements is non-technical in its nature. For a component technology to become a viable solution in an industrial context, its impact on the overall development process needs to be addressed. This includes issues like component life-cycle management, and support for the ability to gradually migrate into the new technology.

We compare existing component technologies for embedded systems with respect to industrial requirements. The requirements are collected from the vehicular industry, but our findings are applicable to similar industries developing resource constrained safety critical embedded distributed real-time computer systems. One of our conclusions is that none of the studied technologies is a perfect match for the industrial requirements. Furthermore, no single technology stands out as being a significantly better choice than the others; each technology has its own pros and cons. The results of our evaluation can be used to guide modifications or extensions to existing technologies, making them better suited for industrial deployment. Companies that want to make use of component-based software engineering as available today can use this evaluation to select a suitable technology.

Component-based software engineering is a technique that has proven effective to increase reusability and efficiency in development of office and webapplications. Though being promising also for development of embedded and dependable systems, the true potential in this domain has not yet been realized. In this paper we present a prototype component technology, developed with safety-critical automotive applications in mind. Thetechnology is illustrated by a case-study, which is also used as the basis for an evaluation and a discussion of the appropriateness and applicability in the considered domain. Our study provides initial positive evidence of the suitability of our technology, but also shows that it needs to be extended to be fully applicable in an industrial context.