Hardware and Software: How Can We Establish Concurrency between the Two?

Abstract

Today, most of our products are combinations of hardware and software. we must remember software works on hardware. But the function of hardware is fixed, while that of software is evolving throughout its life cycle.

Hardware is an individual living. Once they are created, they start to degrade. Therefore, maintenance is a very important task with respect to hardware. But hardware functions are fixed so that it is relatively easy because the objective of maintenance is to restore the degraded quality to its original designed level.

Software, however, is a species. Each software, once born, grows in a different way to adapt to the situation. And many new portions are added on. Therefore, decommissioning becomes very difficult for software.

Since most of our products are combinations of hardware and software, we should pay attention to how we should work them together effectively and how we can decommission the system which is composed of both hardware and software.

This paper discusses this issue and suggests the possible solution.