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

This paper addresses the problem of how to produce reliable software that is also flexible and cost effective for the 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 communication links and protocols. We 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 (ComputerAided 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 comprise 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 war-fighter control systems (e.g. the command-and-control station, cruise missile flight control system, missile defense systems) and demonstrated its capability to support the development of large complex embedded software.