RTI Helps Define Navy's New Open Architecture

RTI Appointed To The Navy Open Systems Architecture Advisory Board

Sunnyvale, CA—28 January 2003—RTI (Real-Time Innovations)

RTI announced it has been appointed to the US Navy's Open Systems Architecture (OSA) Advisory Board. The OSA board is charged with ensuring the Navy selects the best open specifications, standards, and components to be used across the fleet. As a longtime supporter of open standards, RTI provides the OSA board domain expertise in frameworks, resource management, operating systems, and network middleware.

"The OSA is trying to establish a shipboard, open software architecture. Network middleware is a very important part of this effort," says Gordon Hunt, principal applications engineer at RTI. "The OSA has already identified CORBA and DDS, the new Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems specification coming soon from the Object Management Group (OMG), as middleware standards they want to use. The OSA wanted to bring in RTI's expertise in network middleware and the DDS specification in particular."

The OSA

Open Systems Architecture (OSA) is a systems design approach [supported in theory and in principle by verifiable governmental testing platforms such as the Open Architecture Computing Environment (OACE)], that seeks to implement open specifications for interfaces, services and supporting formats. OSA will enable properly engineered components to be utilized across a wide range of systems with minimal change requirements necessary to interoperate with components on local and remote systems.

In addition, the OSA concept will promote interaction between designers, suppliers and end users that facilitates portability. Through OSA, the Government will select common standards and products in the areas of frameworks, middleware, resource management and operating systems, utilizing established and evolving industry standards, and under the OSA premise, avoid proprietary solutions.

CORBA and DDS

The OSA has already identified two middleware specifications from the OMG, CORBA and DDS. The current CORBA standards work well for applications in which services can be logically separated into clients and servers. However, the distributed object model does not serve real-time, data centric applications well. "In the real-time, data centric model, applications need to distribute data, from simple structures to individual variables within complex structures, among processes with low latency, minimal network load, and fast fail-over," states Dr Gerardo Pardo-Castellote, chief technology officer at RTI and primary author of the DDS specification. "The OMG Real-time, Embedded, and Specialized Systems Platform Task Force (RTESS PTF) is producing the Data Distribution Services for Real Time specification so that application developers can have a standard set of services across products from multiple vendors. These services will be based on a publish-subscribe, rather than CORBA's client-server, model that eliminates network programming, gives programmers object properties to control message time limits and automatic hot-swap hierarchies, and reduces memory overhead." An RTESS PTF vote on the specification is expected at the April OMG meeting. Copies of the DDS Request For Proposal, orbos/01-10-01, are available at www.omg.org.

RTI

(Real-Time Innovations) is a leading provider of software tools, platforms, and professional services for controls systems and real-time embedded applications. For over 10 years, the ScopeTools product line has been helping embedded system developers produce higher quality, more reliable solutions. More recently, ConstellationT and NDDS have been helping OEMs build highly complex control systems more quickly and efficiently. The Constellation software platform provides a framework, ready-to-use components, and a graphical programming environment for building unmanned systems. The NDDS middleware and WaveWorksT tools provide seamless communications and comprehensive tools for distributed, real-time systems.

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