Use of RT CORBA in the U.S. Army

The military software developer has a strong mandate to push technology to its limits for superiority in warfare, both in weapons systems and in command and control (C2) systems; strategically, it is hoped that such superiority will minimize the likelihood of combat. Funding realities dictate shorter time to deployment to gain lower costs, and they demand the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions wherever possible to limit custom development. Reuse of frameworks and architectures promises to shorten design time, and reuse of third-party services and components helps to minimize implementation cycles. Capturing the design-intensive decisions associated with domain-dependent techniques as assets that can be used again and again will vastly simplify the building of future projects. These principles have been proven many times, and the paper includes the author´s experiences in demonstrating these savings. In order to provide direction to the software developer, this report presents the US Army´s approaches, focusing on Real-Time (RT) CORBA. The author concludes by providing lessons learned from this work and indicates future directions that can improve and extend the use of these technologies for military systems