GRA model driven design process

The purpose of the Government Reference Architecture (GRA) was to define a modular, open systems architecture that fostered reuse and technology insertion refresh with modular components and product line variants. A graphical model-driven development (MDD) approach was chosen to support rapid design and development of work products that could be quickly leveraged by radio developers within existing development processes with commercial modeling tools. The GRA has matured its model driven methodology through recent efforts transforming the OSSIE-based GRA testbed from an executable UM^™ Platform Independent Model (PIM) to an executable Software Communications Architecture (SCA) Platform Specific Model (PSM). In GRA Phase 2, IBM^® Rational^® Rhapsody^® was used to develop the UML PIM model for the purpose of GRA interface validation. The third step in GRA Phase 3 was to demonstrate an executable PSM implementation by combining the PSM work in Rhapsody with additional tool capability for the SCA CORBA^® model using the SCA domain specific MDD tool, PrismTech Spectra CX. Although gaps were identified in the path to an integrated, standards-based, automated GRA modeling tool chain, productivity gains around improved collaboration and code development accelerations were realized. Evolving the GRA through model-driven PIM and PSM development tools, including the tool chain integration process, will be described in detail in this paper, along with analysis of MDD productivity gains achieved with this integrated tool chain approach.