Computer Aided Prototyping System (CAPS) for Heterogeneous Systems Development and Integration

摘要

This paper addresses the problem of how to produce reliable software that is also flexible and cost-effective for the Department of Defense (DoD) distributed software domain. DoD software systems fall into two categories: information systems and war fighter systems. Both types of systems can be distributed, heterogeneous, and network-based, consisting of a set of components running on different platforms and working together via multiple communications links and protocols. The authors propose to tackle the problem using prototyping and a wrapper and glue technology for interoperability and integration. This paper describes a distributed development environment, CAPS (Computer-Aided Prototyping System), to support rapid prototyping and automatic generation of wrapper and glue software based on designer specifications. The CAPS system uses a fifth-generation prototyping language to model the communication structure, timing constraints, I/O control, and data buffering that constitute the requirements for an embedded software system. The language supports the specification of hard real-time systems with reusable components from domain-specific component libraries. CAPS has been used successfully as a research tool in prototyping large warfighter control systems, and has demonstrated its capability to support the development of large complex embedded software.