Experience of applying CORBA middleware to air traffic control automation systems

Air traffic control (ATC) systems are complex, life-critical systems that have been characterized by long development cycles, high cost and technical risk. Many ATC systems were developed using specialized hardware and proprietary software infrastructure, making it difficult to keep pace with technology advances and growth demands. The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) created by the Object Management Group (OMG) provides an open, stable model for distributed object-oriented systems that improves software reusability, portability, extensibility, and scalability. It has been successfully applied to the development of complex systems. However, the current specification of CORBA still lacks key features such as high availability and real-time performance that are essential for mission critical systems. This paper describes a CORBA-based, highly-available, distributed system architecture developed under an independent research and development (IRAD) project for air traffic control (ATC) systems. It analyzes characteristics and requirements for the distributed ATC computing environment, describes motivations and benefits for using CORBA, and identifies standard CORBA features applicable to ATC software. It also describes our approach, selection of CORBA middleware products, and experience for implementing CORBA-based interobject communications