Ermittlung zentraler Konzepte der Systemarchitektur eingebetteter Systeme anhand eines fachdidaktisch begründeten Kriterienkataloges

This thesis proposes a research concept to determine essential methods and points of views for the development of embedded systems. This contribution is necessary because embedded system development is affected by a fast-paced technology change which makes the selection of long lasting learning content difficult.

The DFG-funded project "competence development with embedded micro- and nanosystems" (KOMINA) in which a competence structure model has been proposed, as well as Schwill’s research on fundamental ideas of informatics provide the basis of this thesis. The latter focuses on the ideas behind a technology rather than the ideas’ specific application in order to determine learning topics which are in particular long lasting. A set of criteria is needed to distinguish fundamental from non-fundamental ideas. All previous research
approaches which used the concept of fundamental ideas focused on primary and secondary education instead of higher education. Thus, every criterion had to be reviewed and adapted for this research project resulting in five criteria which describe fundamental characteristics of embedded system development. The horizontal criterion checks the ideas’ broad applicability and its relation to
the different steps in the development process. In order to satisfy the advanced training criterion, an idea has to be teachable to undergraduates and it has to be a foundation for further learning topics. The criterion of time requires that an idea has been of importance for embedded system development in the past and thus, will arguably be so in the future. Furthermore, the ideas are analyzed in terms of practical and theoretical relevance for embedded system
development by the criterion of sense because two typical career paths for students include working in a research facility or in a company. The criterion of variance highlights the relationship between ideas and verifies that they have certain aspects which distinguish them from each other.

Instead of building on a subjective summary of the field of application, the approach used in this thesis centers around a normative analysis of scientific research areas. The ACM "Transactions on Embedded Computing" have therefore been analyzed over the last five years, resulting in ten fundamental ideas for the development of embedded systems.

Besides objective review guidelines for every criterion, this thesis also enhances the applicability of the fundamental ideas by proposing a course structure which can be directly derived from the analysis process. For the first time, the methodology of the fundamental ideas is therefore not only targeted at curricula creation but at the creation of lectures, too. This thesis gives an example on how such a course concept can be conceptualized for the idea of reconfigurable architectures.