Abstracts of Presentations

Session: Industrial Presentations #1
Developing Reliable Software Rapidly		D. N. Kleidermacher (Green Hills Software, USA)
Although there is significant evidence that following a structured, comprehensive quality management process improves reliability of software relative to the use of unstructured processes, these rigid methodologies often cause a loss in efficiency, delayed time to market, and frustration in the daily lives of software developers and managers. This presentation will introduce key elements of a high integrity process that can not only be used to satisfy the requirements of various high assurance quality standards, but can also improve efficiency of software development. The process is presented as a set of 20 guidance statements that are easy to understand and apply to both legacy and new software development projects.
Publisher Framework (PFW)		J. Klein and D. Sotirovski (Lockheed Martin, USA and Raytheon, Canada)
One of the lasting challenges in building distributed fault tolerant systems is keeping application code size and complexity down. This can be done by capturing the nuances of distributed computing environment and redundant fault tolerant elements into a common middleware layer, thus factorizing the code that would otherwise need to be written again and again by each distributed fault tolerant software component. When the application code is loaded with complexities, and Air Traffic Control (ATC) is certainly one such example, achieving this goal becomes paramount. Under a project called En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is developing a replacement for its aging en route assets and, at the same time, creating a foundation for the many future enhancements that the projected increase in air traffic requires. At the core of the ERAM design is a distributed object oriented (OO) framework called Publisher FrameWork (PFW), which is ERAM’s answer to the aforementioned OO challenge. This presentation describes the PFW properties, the experiences with it accumulated through the first build of the ERAM program, and its applicability to fault tolerant computing.
Assessment of Lane Recognition Systems		D. Dickmanns, H. Graef and M. Anderschitz (BMW and Eurospace, Germany)
In order to reduce accidents not only passive safety has to be increased, but also active safety systems are needed. Active safety systems support safe driving and inform the driver in an early stage before the situation gets critical. In order to identify emerging critical situations the environment of the vehicle has to be perceived. One important feature to be recognized is the road. With information on the position of the vehicle in the lane i.e. the driver can be warned in case of leaving the lane. To detect the road there are several new sensors under development at the moment. This paper deals with the evaluation process of lane recognition systems. The evaluation of the sensor performance is an important part in the development process and should be easy to handle. The great challenge here is the huge variety of environmental situations, from different road constructions up to all weather conditions. It is not possible to test the development steps by means of typical test drives. But a full test is needed because improvements on one side often make other features worse.
Using CORBA to Bring New Life to Legacy Ada Software		J.-C. Mahieux (Top Graph'X, France)
In the context of continuously evolving software technologies, the question of investing or not in existing Ada software is often raised. This presentation describes how new innovative techniques using CORBA can extend the life of an existing Ada system significantly, with low effort. The presentation will use as an example a combat management system developed in Ada.
Session: Industrial Presentations #2
A Metamodel-based Approach to Reverse Engineer Ada Source Code into UML		T. Capelle and X. Sautejeau (Sodius, France)
Many companies have valuable software assets based on legacy Ada source code they want to reuse in new projects. Very often, UML is another key element in the development of such projects and the Ada components must fit in the UML framework that describes the system. This requires some form of reverse engineering of Ada to UML models. However, mapping Ada to UML is a challenging task, the main difficulty deriving from the nature of the two languages. Although they intersect to a large extent, they are a long way from being bijective. Being aware that a perfect mapping between these two specific languages is not achievable, we have to assess what kind of value can still be obtained from the activity of reverse engineering. We propose an approach using metamodelization that refactors Ada code into UML models emphasizing the most relevant aspects of the system. We implemented this solution in the I-Logix Rhapsody in Ada CASE tool. In this presentation, we will first detail some of the main differences between Ada and UML, then we will review different ways to turn Ada code into valuable modeling assets and finally we will describe the architecture of our implementation.
The Development and Deployment of a Workflow System partially written in Ada95		F. Piron (KonAd GmbH, Germany)
In the past 3 years KonAd-GmbH developed the Workflow Engine KWfl which also contains a document management component. The workflow server mostly resides inside an Oracle database as a set of PL/SQL-Packages. An additional serverside library contains functions used for document management. This library is completely written in Ada95. The win32 client software "ElSch" provides a multithreaded graphical User interface to Kwfl with a look and feel inspired by windows explorer. ElSch also is completely written in Ada95. In September 2005 Kwfl and ElSch were installed in a governmental institution in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. In the presentation i will describe our reasons for choosing Ada95 in this project. The software architecture will be shown and i will give a short development and deployment history. In the final conclusion i will discuss our experiences in using Ada95 to built a Database Application with a rich GUI Part.
Parallel Graphical Processing in Ada		M. Ward, S. Palin and N. Audsley (BAE Systems and U. York, UK)
We have been looking at the implementation of high-integrity, real-time, image manipulation systmes. In order to get the performance needed to support high resolutions and frame rates, a parallel hardware implementation using the SPARK and Ravenscar subsets was used. The system provides the flexibility needed for different resolutions and image processing by allowing the number of parallel tasks to be changed according to the requirements of the system. This allows it to run at frame rates of 60Hz, with minimal frame delay, with good prospects of higher performance. The implementation of the system brought to light some shortcomings in the Ada language, and propose the addition of a multi-cast or parallel entry call semantic, allowing simultaneous task release, or data multi-cast.