SBIR-STTR Award

Ever increasing costs and complexities in real-time, embedded software has resulted in the need for product line architectures and supporting infrastructure technology, tools and design methodologies. Software reusability improves the productivity and quality of software development. By using existing software components and architectures to develop new applications, overall development costs and the time needed to bring a new product to market are reduced. Moreover, software quality is improved because components and architectures that already have been verified and proven effective are incorporated into new systems. We propose that a software architecture consisting of an integrated set of component-based software development tools will provide enabling technology for the cost effective deployment and maintenance of real-time, embedded software for next generation smart and brilliant weapon/fire control systems. Significant reductions in time-to-development, cost of system testing and requirements validation will drive the initial market demand for reusable, verifiable software components. Early adopter markets are domains such as pharmaceutical R&D, DOD analysis and command support, NASA mission operations, capital market (trading floor) management, government and commercial logistics management and medical information systems.

The long-range goal of this proposed effort is to overcome barriers to building and deploying military real-time embedded systems from verified, reusable software components. The promise of component-based applications is to enable developers to snap together new applications by mixing and matching prefabricated software components. However, the lack of a standard real-time distributed object operating system, lack of a standard Computer-Aided Software Environment (CASE) tool notation and lack of a standard CASE tool repository has limited the realization of component software. Our approach to fulfilling this need is the CASE Tool Component Factory (CTCF). The CTCF takes advantage of emerging standards such is UML, CORBA, Java and the Internet. For example, Unified Modeling Language UML) is fast becoming the industry standard for object-oriented analysis and designation for object-oriented (00) CASE tools. The Factory distinguishes itself from a tool repository as new tools can be directly manufactured with the dynamic, runtime assembly of different tool components. Once the CTCF is in-place, mission specific tools can be assembled from tool components and architecture and design repositories located anywhere on the Internet.

Benefits:
Reusable tool components will result in significant reductions in the lifecycle cost of distributed embedded real-time systems. Application market niches include, communication network management, patient bed-side monitoring and management, weapons system command and control, unmanned vehicle control, and on-board avionics systems.

Keywords:
corba reference architecture embedded systems component software real time internet case