SPACots

This paper presents a software tool for integrating a child-friendly computer system based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. The effective selection of COTS components, which meet a child’s requirements and expectations, is a non-trivial and challenging optimization problem. However, many published papers consider the functional requirements while ignoring usability requirements. The functional requirements are concerned with what the computer should be able to do, whereas the usability requirements are concerned with the extent to which the child is able to learn effectively and efficiently throughout the COTS based computer. In this paper, the authors propose an iterative five-task selection and integration of COTS process, including both hardware devices and software modules, to be automated. The core of the automated tool is employing Simulated Annealing (SA) to search the design space to match, select, and integrate COTS components with a maximal satisfaction while neither exceeding a given budget nor violating child and performance constraints. A Monte Carlo simulator was utilized to evaluate the goodness of the COTS based computer design. Computational results based on building a computer for a child handwriting e-learning application show feasibility of SPACots in finding a solution satisfying all constraints while reducing the cost by 58%.

This paper describes an approach to the design of a wrapper for self-managing COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) components. Each wrapper for COTS components encapsulates the properties of self-management — detection, reconfiguration, and repair. A COTS component deals with the application perspectives, whereas the wrapper handles the self-management perspectives, separately from the application perspectives. Each wrapper for self-managing COTS components is structured into several objects in support of detection, reconfiguration, and repair of the anomalous COTS components. The approach suggested in this paper is applied to the distributed elevator system consisting of multiple COTS components.

Safety-critical systems and in particular mixed-criticality systems require spatial and temporal separation for their hosted applications and functionalities. Additional constraints are using Commercial Off -- The -- Shelf (COTS) components, portability and determinism. These items are required for economic success for products with low piece numbers and long life-cycles like aircraft. Available embedded processors lack means for spatial separation of Input/Output (I/O) components like an Input/Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU). The objective of this paper is to provide spatial separation for I/O in COTS mixed-criticality embedded real-time systems like avionics with minimum possible impact on performance (transfer time, transfer rate, Central Processing Unit (CPU) usage). The three main contributions of this paper are: (1) The presented Input/Output Memory Protection Unit (IOMPU) enables to upgrade spatial separation for I/O to a system by using COTS components and Non-Transparent Bridge (NTB) technology. In addition, the IOMPU concept is compatible with existing temporal separation solutions. (2) The paper shows a prototype implementation and a potential use case in context of hardware-based I/O virtualization. (3) The evaluation in this paper demonstrates that the IOMPU concept is practically applicable. The performance overhead (transfer time, transfer rate) is below 0.88%, which is almost negligible, particularly compared to state-of-the-art software-based solutions.

Software in the modern age are mostly developed by the of pre fabricated COTS components as it is the simplest way to develop systems quickly consuming lesser cost as compared to the traditional development approaches. The promising features of component-based-software-engineering (CBSE) have introduced new idea of assembling-software rather than building them.Assembling software in this way alternatively results in rapid development, lesser cost with quality software assembled from pre tested COTS components. However the task is not as easy as it appears apparently. Assembling software from the existing components presents other challenges among which the integration time is the one.Various strategies have been proposed to overcome these mismatches each requiring some external mechanism outside the component to solve them.This paper is an endeavour to provide an integrated approach for resolving time semantic mismatches. It enables COTS components to detect semantic mismatches and resolve them by themselves, thus letting the COTS component itself to participate in mismatch resolution process.The external mediation, in this way, will be reduced up to maximum, resulting in a smooth process with a cut-down in cost. The proposed approach will further enhance the fault tolerance capabilities of COTS components as it is used more and more.

: Small unmanned systems provide great utility to military applications due to their portable and expendable design. These systems are, however, costly to develop, produce, and maintain, making it desirable to integrate available commercial off the shelf (COTS) components. This research investigates the integration of COTS components through the development of a modular unified command and control (C2) architecture for heterogeneous and homogeneous vehicle teams to accomplish formation flocking and communication relay scenarios. A vehicle agnostic architecture was developed to be applied across different vehicle platforms, different vehicle combination, and different cooperative missions. COTS components consisting primarily of open source hardware and software were integrated and tested based on the positional accuracy, precision, and other qualitative measures. The resulting system successfully demonstrated formation flocking in three of four vehicle combinations, with the forth still demonstrating leader follower behaviors. The system achieved at best a mean positional error of 0.99m, a standard deviation of 0.44m, and a DRMS of 0.59m....

The purpose of the project was to develop the processes for using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts for WR production and to put in place a system for implementing the data management tools required to disseminate, store, track procurement, and qualify vendors. Much of the effort was devoted to determining if the use of COTS parts was possible. A basic question: How does the Nuclear Weapons Complex (NWC) begin to use COTS in the weapon Stockpile Life Extension Programs with high reliability, affordability, while managing risk at acceptable levels? In FY00, it was determined that a certain weapon refurbishment program could not be accomplished without the use of COTS components. The elements driving the use of COTS components included decreased cost, greater availability, and shorter delivery time. Key factors that required implementation included identifying the best suppliers and components, defining life cycles and predictions of obsolescence, testing the feasibility of using COTS components with a test contractor to ensure capability, as well as quality and reliability, and implementing the data management tools required to disseminate, store, track procurement, and qualify vendors. The primary effort of this project then was to concentrate on the risks involved in the use of COTS and address the issues of part and vendor selection, procurement and acceptance processes, and qualification of the parts via part and sample testing. The Enterprise Component Information System (eCIS) was used to manage the information generated by the COTS process. eCIS is a common interface for both the design and production of NWC components and systems integrating information between SNL National Laboratory (SNL) and the Kansas City Plant (KCP). The implementation of COTS components utilizes eCIS from part selection through qualification release. All part related data is linked across an unclassified network for access by both SNL and KCP personnel. The system includes not only NWC part information but also includes technical reference data for over 25 Million electronic and electromechanical commercial and military parts via a data subscription. With the capabilities added to the system through this project, eCIS provides decision support, parts list/BOM analysis, editing, tracking, workflows, reporting, and history/legacy information integrating manufacturer reference, company technical, company business, and design data.

Dealing with Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) com- ponents is a daily business for avionic system manufacturers. They are necessary ingredients for hardware designs, but are not built in accordance with the avionics consensus standard DO- 254 for Airborne Electronic Hardware (AEH) design. Especially for complex COTS hardware components used in safety critical AEH, like Microcontroller Units (MCUs), additional assurance activities have to be performed. All of them together shall form a convincing confident, that the hardware is safe in its intended operation environment. The focus of DO-254 is one approach called Design Assurance (DA). Its aim is to reduce design errors by adherence of prescribed process objectives for the entire design life cycle. The effort for certain COTS assurance activities could be reduced if it is possible to demonstrate, that the COTS design process is based on similar effective design process guide- lines to minimize desgin errors. In the last years, semiconductor manufacturers released safety MCUs in compliance to the ISO 26262 standard, dedicated for the development of functional safe automotive systems. These products are COTS components in the sense of avionics, but they are also developed according to a process that focuses on reduction of design errors. In this paper an evaluation is performed to figure out if the ISO 26262 prescribes a similar DA approach as the DO-254, in order to reduce the COTS assurance effort for coming avionic systems.

Budget and schedule savings are the driving factors for the adoption of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software components by software development organizations. The reliance on COTS components has lead to component-based development (CBD) software systems and introduced changes to the software development process and hence software project management responsibilities and roles. This paper introduces a general framework discussion of essential management aspects for CBD, focusing on COTS. Particularly, stakeholders, requirements, component selection and architecture management issues are discussed from different angles. Some CBD management guidelines and best practices for these aspects are outlined in the conclusion. In addition, CBD management challenges are drawn along with some suggestions in the conclusion section.

Traditionally, the Navy has developed systems which distribute time-sensitive data using specialized components such as dedicated point-to-point communications links. Today, however the Navy is moving away from specialized solutions and toward Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) components to both keep up with the rapid pace of technology changes and to reduce system costs. COTS components are designed to meet needs of applications in the general commercial marketplace, not the specialized needs of real-time applications. This paper examines the ability of COTS workstations to distribute and process time sensitive data in a shared media environment. Several metrics are defined and then used to evaluate the performance of a simulated time sensitive data distribution and processing mechanism running on COTS workstations from Hewlett Packard, the Digital Equipment Corporation, and Sun Microsystems. The data collected is analyzed. COTS real-time operating system features are then used to tune the performance of the client and server components of the mechanism.

Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) provides a high efficient and low cost way to construct software systems by integrating reusable software components. Although CBSD has already become a widely accepted paradigm, it is still beyond possibility to assemble components easily from commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components into one application system. A variety of mismatches between components often impede the integration of COTS components, and component adaptation is becoming a key problem in Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE). Aiming at this requirement, this paper presents a self-adaptive software architecture (model-based) approach for supporting seamless integration of COTS components. Specifically, we first propose a self-adaptive software architecture model, and then we discuss and exemplify how to eliminate the mismatches between heterogeneous COTS components based on this model. A simplified on-line shopping system is referred throughout the paper to illustrate our approach.

The concept for the system described herein is an active/passive Nuclear Materials Identification System{sup 2} (NMIS) that incorporates gamma ray spectrometry{sup 3}. This incorporation of gamma ray spectrometry would add existing capability into this system. This Multiple Attribute System can determine a wide variety of attributes for Pu and highly enriched uranium (HEU) of which a selected subset could be chosen. This system can be built using commercial off the shelf (COTS) components. NMIS systems are at All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF) and Russian Federal Nuclear Center Institute of Technical Physics, (VNIITF) and measurements with Pu have been performed at VNIIEF and analyzed successfully for mass and thickness of Pu. NMIS systems are being used successfully for HEU at the Y-12 National Security Complex. The use of active gamma ray spectrometry for high explosive HE and chemical agent detection is a well known activation analysis technique, and it is incorporated here. This report describes the system, explains the attribute determination methods for fissile materials, discusses technical issues to be resolved, discusses additional development needs, presents a schedule for building from COTS components, and assembly with existing components, and discusses implementation issues such as lack of need for facility modification and low radiation exposure.

Component-based software development (CBSD) is becoming more and more important since it promotes reuse to higher levels of abstraction. As a consequence, many components are available being either open-source software (OSS) or commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS). However, it is still unclear how the decision for acquiring OSS or COTS components is made in practice. This paper describes an empirical study on why project decision-makers selected COTS instead of OSS components, or vice versa. The study was performed as an international survey in Norway, Italy and Germany. It focused on decision making on using off-the-shelf (OTS) components. We have gathered answers from 83 projects using only COTS components and 44 projects using only OSS components. Results of this study show significant differences and commonalities of integrating OSS or COTS components. Moreover, the study illustrates several research questions that warrant future research.

At the heart of a well-disciplined, systematic methodology that explicitly supports the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components is a clearly defined process for effectively using components that meet the needs of the system under development. In this paper, we present the CARE/SA approach that supports the iterative matching, ranking, and selection of COTS components. The components are represented as an aggregate of its functional and non-functional requirements and architecture.

In the past, functional test requirements (FTR) or test requirement documents (TRD) and test program sets (TPS) were standalone items developed by individual engineers. In some cases one engineer would write the FTR/TRD and another would develop the TPS. Commercial ATLAS FTRs are prepared in ARINC 616 and 626 ATLAS. Military TRDs are written in IEEE ATLAS 716 versions. Previous test reuse attempts have not been successful because additional software, like browsers, is required to support these efforts. It was difficult to justify writing new software (for example browsers) to manage the application software. Today, commercial off the shelf (COTS) tools are in place to browse and view information from circuit diagrams to documents to source code. These tools can develop hierarchies to organize the information. These COTS tools are available throughout Boeing on many types of workstations and personal computers on every engineer's desk. This paper discusses how a reusable test library (RTL) is being developed using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) tools such as Mosaic to address commercial and military test applications. It describes each of the tools and the process to develop TPSs using the reuse library. It defines the metrics and the benefits achieved.

Requirements engineering for COTS based systems