REVERSE ENGINEERING
Aravind .N ME7 7409
INTRODUCTION
Engineering is the profession involved in designing, manufacturing, constructing, and maintaining of products, systems, and structures. At a higher level, there are two types of engineering: forward engineering and reverse engineering. Forward engineering is the traditional process of moving from high-level abstractions and logical designs to the physical implementation of a system. In some situations, there may be a physical part without any technical details, such as drawings, bills-of-material, or without engineering data, such as thermal and electrical properties.
What is Reverse Engineering?
The process of duplicating an existing component, subassembly, or product, without the aid of drawings, documentation, or computer model is known as reverse engineering.
Reverse engineering can be viewed as the process of analyzing a system to: Identify the system's components and their interrelationships Create representations of the system in another form or a higher level of abstraction Create the physical representation of that system
Application of Reverse Engineering
Reverse engineering is very common in such diverse fields as software engineering, entertainment, automotive, consumer products, microchips, chemicals, electronics, and mechanical designs. For example, when a new machine comes to market, competing manufacturers may buy one machine and disassemble it to learn how it was built and how it works. A chemical company may use reverse engineering to defeat a patent on a competitor's manufacturing process. In civil engineering, bridge and building designs are copied from past successes so there will be less chance of catastrophic failure. In software engineering, good source code is often a variation of other good source code.
REASONS FOR REVERSE ENGINEERING A PART OR PRODUCT
The original manufacturer of a product no longer produces a product There is inadequate documentation of the original design The original manufacturer no longer exists, but a customer needs the product The original design documentation has been lost or never existed Some bad features of a product need to be designed out. For example, excessive wear might indicate where a product should be improved
To strengthen the good features of a product based on long-term usage of the product To analyze the good and bad features of competitors' product To explore new avenues to improve product performance and features To gain competitive benchmarking methods to understand competitor's products and develop better products
The original CAD model is not sufficient to support modifications or current manufacturing methods The original supplier is unable or unwilling to provide additional parts The original equipment manufacturers are either unwilling or unable to supply replacement parts, or demand inflated costs for sole-source parts To update obsolete materials or antiquated manufacturing processes with more current, lessexpensive technologies
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REVERSE ENGGINEERING AND OTHER TYPES
The most traditional method of the development of a technology is referred to as "forward engineering." In the construction of a technology, manufacturers develop a product by implementing engineering concepts and abstractions. By contrast, reverse engineering begins with final product, and works backward to recreate the engineering concepts by analyzing the design of the system and the interrelationships of its components.
Value engineering refers to the creation of an improved system or product to the one originally analyzed. While there is often overlap between the methods of value engineering and reverse engineering, the goal of reverse engineering itself is the improved documentation of how the original product works by uncovering the underlying design. The working product that results from a reverse engineering effort is more like a duplicate of the original system, without necessarily adding modifications or improvements to the original design.
Reengineering
The main proponents of re-engineering were Michael Hammer and James A. Champy. Reengineering (or re-engineering) is the radical redesign of an organization's processes, especially its business processes. Rather than organizing a firm into functional specialties (like production, accounting, marketing, etc.) and looking at the tasks that each function performs according to the reengineering theory, be looking at complete processes from materials acquisition, to production, to marketing and distribution.
STAGES INVOLVED IN THE REVERSE ENGINEERING PROCESS
In order to reverse engineer a product or component of a system, engineers and researchers generally follow the following four-stage process: Identifying the product or component which will be reverse engineered Observing or disassembling the information documenting how the original product works Implementing the technical data generated by reverse engineering in a replica or modified version of the original Creating a new product (and, perhaps, introducing it into the market)
First stage
In the first stage in the process, sometimes called "prescreening," reverse engineers determine the candidate product for their project. Potential candidates for such a project include singular items, parts, components, units, subassemblies, some of which may contain many smaller parts sold as a single entity.
second stage
The second stage, disassembly or decompilation of the original product, is the most time-consuming aspect of the project. In this stage, reverse engineers attempt to construct a characterization of the system by accumulating all of the technical data and instructions of how the product works.
third stage
In the third stage of reverse engineering, reverse engineers try to verify that the data generated by disassembly or decompilation is an accurate reconstruction the original system. Engineers verify the accuracy and validity of their designs by testing the system, creating prototypes, and experimenting with the results.
Final stage
The final stage of the reverse engineering process is the introduction of a new product into the marketplace. These new products are often innovations of the original product with competitive designs, features, or capabilities. These products may also be adaptations of the original product for use with other integrated systems, such as different platforms of computer operating systems.
ACTUAL REVERSE ENGGINEERING PROCESS:
Examples
Reference:
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