Table Of ContentREVERSE ENGINEERING –
RECENT ADVANCES
AND APPLICATIONS
Edited by Alexandru C. Telea
Reverse Engineering – Recent Advances and Applications
Edited by Alexandru C. Telea
Published by InTech
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Copyright © 2012 InTech
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First published February, 2012
Printed in Croatia
A free online edition of this book is available at www.intechopen.com
Additional hard copies can be obtained from [email protected]
Reverse Engineering – Recent Advances and Applications, Edited by Alexandru C. Telea
p. cm.
ISBN 978-953-51-0158-1
Contents
Preface IX
Part 1 Software Reverse Engineering 1
Chapter 1 Software Reverse Engineering in
the Domain of Complex Embedded Systems 3
Holger M. Kienle, Johan Kraft and Hausi A. Müller
Chapter 2 GUIsurfer: A Reverse Engineering Framework
for User Interface Software 31
José Creissac Campos, João Saraiva,
Carlos Silva and João Carlos Silva
Chapter 3 MDA-Based Reverse Engineering 55
Liliana Favre
Chapter 4 Reverse Engineering Platform Independent Models
from Business Software Applications 83
Rama Akkiraju, Tilak Mitra and Usha Thulasiram
Chapter 5 Reverse Engineering the Peer to Peer
Streaming Media System 95
Chunxi Li and Changjia Chen
Part 2 Reverse Engineering Shapes 115
Chapter 6 Surface Reconstruction from
Unorganized 3D Point Clouds 117
Patric Keller, Martin Hering-Bertram and Hans Hagen
Chapter 7 A Systematic Approach for Geometrical and
Dimensional Tolerancing in Reverse Engineering 133
George J. Kaisarlis
Chapter 8 A Review on Shape Engineering and Design
Parameterization in Reverse Engineering 161
Kuang-Hua Chang
VI Contents
Chapter 9 Integrating Reverse Engineering and Design for
Manufacturing and Assembly in Products Redesigns:
Results of Two Action Research Studies in Brazil 187
Carlos Henrique Pereira Mello, Carlos Eduardo Sanches da Silva,
José Hamilton Chaves Gorgulho Junior, Fabrício Oliveira de Toledo,
Filipe Natividade Guedes, Dóris Akemi Akagi
and Amanda Fernandes Xavier
Part 3 Reverse Engineering in Medical and Life Sciences 215
Chapter 10 Reverse Engineering Gene Regulatory Networks
by Integrating Multi-Source Biological Data 217
Yuji Zhang, Habtom W. Ressom and Jean-Pierre A. Kocher
Chapter 11 Reverse-Engineering the Robustness
of Mammalian Lungs 243
Michael Mayo, Peter Pfeifer and Chen Hou
Chapter 12 Reverse Engineering and FEM Analysis
for Mechanical Strength Evaluation of
Complete Dentures: A Case Study 163
A. Cernescu, C. Bortun and N. Faur
Preface
Introduction
In the recent decades, the amount of data produced by scientific, engineering, and life
science applications has increased with several orders of magnitude. In parallel with
this development, the applications themselves have become increasingly complex in
terms of functionality, structure, and behaviour. In the same time, development and
production cycles of such applications exhibit a tendency of becoming increasingly
shorter, due to factors such as market pressure and rapid evolution of supporting and
enabling technologies.
As a consequence, an increasing fraction of the cost of creating new applications and
manufacturing processes shifts from the creation of new artifacts to the adaption of
existing ones. A key component of this activity is the understanding of the design,
operation, and behavior of existing manufactured artifacts, such as software code
bases, hardware systems, and mechanical assemblies. For instance, in the software
industry, it is estimated that maintenance costs exceed 80% of the total costs of a
software product’s lifecycle, and software understanding accounts for as much as half
of these maintenance costs.
Reverse engineering encompasses the set of activities aiming at (re)discovering the
functional, structural, and behavioral semantics of a given artifact, with the aim of
leveraging this information for the efficient usage or adaption of that artifact, or the
creation of related artifacts. Rediscovery of information is important in those cases
when the original information is lost, unavailable, or cannot be efficiently processed
within a given application context. Discovery of new information, on the other hand, is
important when new application contexts aim at reusing information which is
inherently present in the original artifact, but which was not made explicitly available
for reuse at the time of creating that artifact.
Reverse engineering has shown increasing potential in various application fields
during the last decade, due to a number of technological factors. First, advances in
data analysis and data mining algorithms, coupled with an increase of cheap
computing power, has made it possible to extract increasingly complex information
from raw data, and to structure this information in ways that make it effective for
X Preface
answering specific questions on the function, structure, and behavior of the artifact
under study. Secondly, new data sources, such as 3D scanners, cell microarrays, and a
large variety of sensors, has made new types of data sources available from which
detailed insights about mechanical and living structures can be extracted.
Given the above factors, reverse engineering applications, techniques, and tools have
shown a strong development and diversification. However, in the same time, the types
of questions asked by end users and stakeholders have become increasingly complex.
For example, while a decade ago the reverse engineering of a software application
would typically imply extracting the static structure of an isolated code base of tens of
thousands of lines of code written in a single programming language, current software
reverse engineering aims at extracting structural, behavioral, and evolutionary
patterns from enterprise applications of millions of lines of code written in several
programming languages, running on several machines, and developed by hundreds of
individuals over many years. Similarly, reverse engineering the geometric and
mechanical properties of physical shapes has evolved from the extraction of coarse
surface models to the generation of part-whole descriptions of complex articulated
shapes with the submillimeter accuracy required for manufacturing processes. This
has fostered the creation of new reverse engineering techniques and tools.
This book gives an overview of recent advances in reverse engineering techniques,
tools, and application domains. The aim of the book is, on the one hand, to provide the
reader with a comprehensive sample of the possibilities that reverse engineering
currently offers in various application domains, and on the other hand to highlight the
current research-level and practical challenges that reverse engineering techniques and
tools are faced.
Structure of this book
To provide a broad view on reverse engineering, the book is divided into three parts:
software reverse engineering, reverse engineering shapes, and reverse engineering in
medical and life sciences. Each part contains several chapters covering applications,
techniques, and tools for reverse engineering relevant to specific use-cases in the
respective application domain. An overview of the structure of the book is given below.
Part 1: Software Reverse Engineering
In part 1, we look at reverse engineering the function, structure, and behavior of large
software-intensive applications. The main business driver behind software reverse
engineering is the increased effort and cost related to maintainting existing software
applications and designing new applications that wish to reuse existing legacy software.
As this cost increases, getting detailed information on the structure, run-time behavior,
and quality attributes of existing software applications becomes highly valuable.
In Chapter 1, Kienle et al. Give a comprehensive overview of reverse engineering tools
and techniques applied to embedded software. Apart from detailing the various pro’s
Description:InTech, 2012. — 292 p.In the recent decades, the amount of data produced by scientific, engineering, and life science applications has increased with several orders of magnitude. In parallel with this development, the applications themselves have become increasingly complex in terms of functionali
