The Impact of the Development of Universal Interfaces and Model Driven Architecture Development on Attaining Plug and Play Systems
Mike Gibbs, Jeffrey Wit, Fred Benedick · AIAA Infotech@Aerospace 2007 Conference and Exhibit · 2007
The US Air Force efforts to develop a Universal Armament Interface is indicative of the need to decouple integration of payloads and subsystems from major, costly, system-wide software updates. These efforts, however, are only initial steps in the quest for payload integration techniques that are analogous to commercial personal computing plug and play concepts. Weapons platforms and aerial and space vehicles will always have added safety and reliability constraints and will be constrained in ways that do not affect personal computing. Universal interfaces, coupled with universally accepted application programming interfaces, developed via a model driven architecture approach and utilizing evolving code generation tools should move even safety critical systems further along the path on the quest for Plug and Play. The model driven architecture approach is an emerging methodology that holds the promise of adding the disciplines and precision to software engineering that have been accepted for decades by most of the other engineering disciplines. The current software engineering approach, while improving substantially through the efforts of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), is still basically an individual craftsman approach with each module of code carefully handcrafted. The software products are, therefore, themselves intellectual property and often only maintainable by the original craftsman. This approach, just as hand wiring every circuit, works well enough in simple systems. More complex systems render this approach cumbersome and often unreliable. Model driven architecture development with automated code generation is the next step in capturing the true intellectual property – the knowledge of technology domain experts – in models which define functionality. The development and integration process then becomes: (1) Construct the system from large, reusable components, (2) Build precise, predictive models, (3) Subject models to rigorous testing prior to implementation, (4) Establish welldefined automated construction processes, and (5) Build the product. Integration can then become a matter of validating the interaction of models during the rigorous testing. Currently we collectively are at the initial stage of such an approach. The standardization of universal interfaces is, in effect, the initial compilation of the intellectual property of our domain expertise. These interfaces are technologically agnostic – defining functionality and not based on specific implementations. This technological agnosticism will effectively provide the basis for Plug and Play within complex systems and systems of systems.