Sustainable embedded software lifecycle planning

Abstract

Time-to-market is a crucial factor in increasing market share in the consumer electronics (CE) market. Furthermore, fierce competition in the market tends to sharply lower the prices of brand-new CE products as soon as they are released. Software-intensive embedded system design methods such as hardware/software co-design have been studied with the goal of reducing development lead-time by designing hardware and software simultaneously. Many researchers, however, concentrate on static design methods—in which design remains unchanged once determined. To survive this deadly market competition, a dynamic design strategy that takes various market conditions into account is needed for software-intensive embedded systems. In this paper, a sustainable embedded software lifecycle planning (SESLIP) process based on the evolution of embedded software is proposed. The SESLIP process provides a dynamic method for both selecting product lifecycle design alternatives and generating a profit-maximizing transition plan that covers the entire lifecycle of a product