Re-ADA

Abstract

Military commands must respond to a variety of situations by quickly assembling and organizing coalition forces consisting of different components from several countries. Dependable interoperability of their C4ISR systems is vital to the success of many military applications where pressing new requirements quickly emerge and undergo rapid change. In order to achieve dependable interoperability, a reliable infrastructure is critical to incorporating operational components into C4ISR systems. Software architectures and related techniques hold the answer to interoperable, reliable and evolvable C4ISR systems. This paper analyzes the major aspects of dependable interoperability for C4ISR, and presents a Quantitative Interoperating Model (QIM) for enabling seamless interconnection, effective intercommunication and dependable interoperation between heterogeneous components over the network. Based on the QIM, an approach is synthesized toward Reliable Ada-based Descriptive Architecture (re-ADA) for C4ISR. As an executable architectural framework, re-ADA can directly be mapped into Ada95 code and constructed on the basis of CORBA to support distributed computing over-the-network. In particular, the well-formalized QIM - through mapping dependability into quantitative attributes that are attached to architectural artifacts - makes it possible to statically verify quantitative attributes during architectural design, and dynamically monitor them at runtime.