Full-Scale Analysis and Integration
In this instance, an application was reengineered from Jovial into Ada. As part of the translation process, a MetaH model was created early and the system architecture was analyzed for schedulability and other performance requirements. Early detection of potential performance problems resulted in a shortening of integration efforts compared to traditional development. (MetaH is a precursor of AADL.)
Once the architecture was operational under MetaH, a port to a dual processor platform was undertaken with an even higher reduction in effort compared to traditional porting approaches.
Figure 1 :
The porting of a missile guidance system from Jovial into Ada
In Figure 1, the traditional approach represents a basic port into Ada; the MetaH approach represents use of MetaH to model the runtime system architecture. Use of the MetaH approach led to early timing and performance analysis and corrections in the architecture. The benefit showed when it came to system integration.
In a second phase, the Ada implemented system was ported from a single processor platform to a dual processor platform. In the case of MetaH, this retargeting effort (shown as last step in the chart in Figure 1) involved reconfigurating by changing some properties in the MetaH description and to operationalizing the platform to platform communication—resulting in a cost savings of ~90% over the traditional porting effort.