Implementing a Behaviour Tree Analysis Tool Using Eclipse Development Frameworks
Patrick P. C. Lee, Tuan Anh Tran, Vincent Phillips, Phillip Papacostantinou, Ashley M. Aitken, Sonya Rosbotham · Australian Software Engineering Conference · 2008
Over the last 7 years a team at the Griffin University, Software Quality Institute, lead by Professor Geoff Dromey, has developed the Behaviour Tree Analysis technique, which provides a method of analysing and documenting requirements and behaviour of large and complex systems. For complex systems these trees become very large and are difficult to use, expand, review and master. This leads to serious problems with respect to the usability of this technique. Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the development lifecycle. The availability of a robust integrated stack of open source components accessible from within the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) acts as a powerful enabler for modern software development. This presentation will provide an overview of the Behaviour Tree Analysis technique and the advantages it provides to the specification of large systems. The presentation will also describe the results of using the Eclipse RCP and a number of the Application Development Frameworks to develop a feature rich graphical environment capable of supporting industry scale analysis and training, useable by Griffith University consultants and Raytheon Australia engineers. The presentation will summarise the significant benefits experienced during the development of the analysis tool and a discussion of the problems that required resolution during the project.