2000 Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (CCRTS), June 11-13, 2000, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CAThis 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 (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 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.This research was supported in part by the U. S. Army Research Office under contract/grant number 35037-MA and 40473-MA
