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 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, IO 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.