Sunnyvale, CA—22 April 2003—Today, RTI announced the Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems (DDS) specification cleared a major milestone and is on track to become an adopted specification by June 2003. DDS was recommended for adoption at the OMG Technical Meeting held in Orlando earlier this month. The DDS specification provides a data-centric publish-subscribe communications model critical in many real-time systems. Real-time applications like command and control systems, distributed simulators, medical equipment, avionics and industrial automation will directly benefit from this new standard. The OMG has provided the CORBA standard for real-time systems for years. However, CORBA's client-server communications model is not well suited for data-centric distributed applications. DDS fills this critical need and completes the real-time networking standards picture.
CORBA - the OMG's Common Object Request Broker Architecture - provides a client-server communications model for distributed systems. Client-server communications is characterized by an organization where certain applications - servers - offer services that other applications - clients - access. Communications is initiated by the client that must bind to the server and invoke operations to change or access information. Client-server is a popular model in enterprise applications where clients access databases and other centralized resources on the servers. However, it is not well suited for distributing data in real-time applications.
Publish-subscribe Data Distribution is an ideal communications mechanism for moving data. "Most mission-critical, real-time systems best fit the data-centric, publish-subscribe communications model," states Gerardo-Pardo Castellote, RTI chief technology officer and co-author of the DDS specification. "For example, distributed command and control systems with large amounts of periodic data are inherently data-centric. A sensor on the network periodically sends out data updates to controllers, loggers, or other subscribers on the network. Publish-subscribe is almost a necessity for these systems."
The publish-subscribe communications model is already popular for real-time applications. There are some commercial and many in-house implementations in use today. However, to-date, there have been no general-purpose data-distribution standards.
"The OMG Middleware, and Related Services Platform Task Force (MARS PTF) produced the DDS specification to address the need for a data-centric publish-subscribe standard, " states Char Wales, co-chair of the MARS PTF at OMG. "CORBA covers the client-server communication requirements for distributed real-time systems and DDS covers the data-distribution requirements. The DDS specification will be a significant addition to OMG's real-time networking standards."
RTI (Real-Time Innovations, www.rti.com) is a leading provider of software tools, middleware, and professional services for distributed real-time systems and embedded applications. For over 10 years, the ScopeTools product line has been helping embedded system developers produce higher quality, more reliable solutions. The NDDS middleware and WaveWorks tools provide seamless communications and comprehensive tools for distributed, real-time system builders. More recently, Constellation and NDDS have been helping OEMs build highly complex real-time systems more quickly and efficiently.
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