The development of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) requires the integration of a diverse range of applications and sub-systems in wide-area-networks (WAN) supporting distributed architectures. The software applications are increasingly built from software components re-used within design patterns and frameworks. This paper describes the issues involved in component-based software development (CBSD) and discusses current practice and the implications for ITS. The development of ITS has been underway for several years and much has been achieved. Nevertheless the issues of interoperability and integration are not fully resolved and a major factor is the difficulty to achieve effective integration of ITS. A key issue is the cost-effective re-use of major software investment made previously to meet similar system requirements elsewhere. To assist in this endeavor, the software application and system integration community has moved to component-based development but in so doing have encountered a range of new issues.
Abstract