Over the last 12 years, middleware and programming standards have evolved for distributed object computing, including the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Unified Modeling Language (UML), and the Java language. As these standards achieved commercial acceptance, MITRE initiated, coordinated, and led activities to extend them for real-time systems.

MITRE chairs the Real-Time Special Interest Group in the Object Management Group, which owns the CORBA and UML standards, leads the Java Community Process Distributed Real-Time Specification for Java Expert Group, and has participated in the Real-Time CORBA specifications, Java Community Process Expert Group for the Real-Time Specification for Java, and J-Consortium Real-Time Core Extensions. MITRE’s participation has leveraged MITRE standards research and ensured that the standards share a compatible programming model.

As a result of MITRE’s efforts, CORBA now supports both real-time fixed priority distributed computing and dynamic scheduling, as well as multicast and time synchronization, and a set of UML profiles for real-time systems has been specified. A set of related CORBA extensions supports embedded systems, fault tolerance, and parallel processing. Ongoing work focuses on “pluggable” transports, real-time data distribution, load balancing, online updates, and a real-time event/notification service. Real-time CORBA forms part of the real-time extensions to the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Common Operating Environment, and is being used in systems such as the Air Force’s Theater Battle Management Command and Control System.

Recently, the Java platform has been extended independently by the Java Community process and the J-Consortium to support real-time systems on single Java platforms. A third specification under development will extend the Java Community Process specification to include distributed real-time Java applications. This technology is being considered for future DOD applications.

Some challenges for MITRE are to extend the real-time support in CORBA to other paradigms such as transactions, continue the real-time and related extensions of UML, expand the areas of Java that support real-time systems, bring Quality of Service-based real-time support to Web services and peer-to-peer computing, and devise theory and methodologies for dynamic asynchronous real-time systems.

For more information, please contact Dock Allen using the employee directory.