As the result of the Department of Defense's (DoD) initiative to transition Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) technologies to existing and future military aircraft, McDonnell Douglas Aerospace (MDA) required information on industry "Open Systems" capabilities and research leading to the definition of advanced strategies which would utilize the benefits of commercially based, open system computing architecture. Howard University , as the primary provider, with the support of MDA, conducted an advanced research effort in the area of embedded real-time systems development as part of the Distributed Mult-Processing Avionics Research (Z50353) at the request of MDA. The research concentrated on reporting commercial standards, products, computing trends and issues relevant to future MDA projects.
The information in the compendium was obtained through an extensive search of technical papers, journals, books, and the World Wide Web. The compendium contained information regarding the identification of sources of information related to state of the art COTS for developing embedded real-time systems. Specifically, the compendium contained information pertaining to the Ada 95 programming language and its impact on the development of embedded real-time systems. This included information on the AdaIC, a major source for Ada information, major projects using the Ada language, a list of currently validated Ada compilers, and a book containing a list of current Ada products and tools. The compendium contained information on various real time operating systems and discussed issues involving their development such as rate monotonic analysis. In addition, the compendium contained a glossary of technical terms, a listing of key principles for rate monotonic analysis and a compiled bibliography of technical research.
As a result of this research effort we concluded that there are several sources of information regarding the development of embedded real-time systems, however, prior to project initialization we recommend that the World Wide Web be thoroughly perused because it contains a wealth of current information which is easily accessible and very applicable.