Composable embedded systems

Over the past fifty years the size of computer applications, as gauged by any reasonable measure, has increased exponentially. In contrast, our cognitive capabilities for understanding have not changed. This discrepancy has forced us to look for more abstract representations of subsystems and for construction rules that help us to reduce the number of elements and the intricacy of interactions that we have to consider in order to get an understanding of the system behavior. In this contribution we argue that the consequent application of the concept of composability can significantly reduce the mental effort required to understand the behavior of a large embedded system