Improving Maintenance by Creating a DSL for Configuring a Fieldbus

Mathijs Schuts and Jozef Hooman

Proc. Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM’16), pages 28-34, 2016.

ABSTRACT

The high-tech industry produces complex devices in which software plays an important role. Since these devices have been developed for many decades, an increasing part of the software can be classified as legacy which is difficult to maintain and to extend. To improve the maintainability of legacy components, domain specific languages (DSLs) provide promising perspectives. We present a DSL for creating configuration files that describe the topology of a fieldbus. This DSL improves the maintainability and extensibility of a legacy component. Compared to the current way-of-working, the configuration files generated by the DSL are of higher quality due to the concise representation of DSL instances and additional validation checks. To raise the level of abstraction even more, we have created a second DSL which allows a concise description of system configurations and the generation of topologies.

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