International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The space shuttle has been flying for seventeen years and NASA plans to fly it for many more. To meet the requirement of supporting future flights, NASA has undertaken a Shuttle Upgrades Program to improve various shuttle components. The avionics on the solid rocket booster (SRB) is one of the areas being upgraded. To develop avionics hardware, the environments that they are to encounter during flight must be defined to a higher degree of fidelity than is currently available. This paper describes the effort to determine these environments via the use of a commercial off the shelf data acquisition system.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / We have long used standards to guide the development process of software systems. Standards such as POSIX, X-Windows, SQL have become part of the language of software developers and have guided the coding of systems that are intended to be portable and interoperable. Standards also have a role to play in the integration of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, we have been participating on the Renaissance Team, a reengineering effort that has seen the focus shift from custom-built systems to the use of COTS to satisfy prime mission functions. As part of this effort, we developed a process that identified standards that are applicable to the evaluation and integration of products and assessed how those standards should be applied. Since the goal is to develop a set of standards that can be used to instantiate systems of differing sizes and capabilities, the standards selected have been broken into four areas: global integration standards, global development standards, mission development standards, and mission integration standards. Each of the areas is less restrictive than the preceding area in the standards that are allowed. This paper describes the process that we used to select and categorize the standards to be applied to Renaissance systems.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1998 / Town & Country Resort Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / A real-time telemetry simulator of the IUS spacecraft has recently entered operation to train Flight Control Teams for the 1aunch of the AXAF telescope from the Shuttle. The simulator has proven to be a successful higher fidelity implementation of its predecessor, while affirming the rapid development methodology used in its design. Although composed of COTS hardware and software, the system simulates the full breadth of the mission: Launch, Pre-Deployment-Checkout, Burn Sequence, and AXAF/IUS separation. Realism is increased through patching the system into the operations facility to simulate IUS telemetry, Shuttle telemetry, and the Tracking Station link (commands and status message).

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 23-26, 2000 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / TSI TelSys, Inc. is in the process of developing a production level, continuously tunable satellite receiver designed to support multiple high data rate, low earth and geostationary orbit missions in the 20 Mbps to 800 Mbps composite QPSK data rate range. This paper will evaluate market demands on satellite receivers and outline receiver design technique as a solution to high rate, multi-mission support.

El proceso de construir software a partir del ensamblaje e integración de soluciones de software pre-fabricadas, conocidas como componentes COTS (Comercial-Off-The-Shelf) se ha convertido en una necesidad estratégica en una amplia variedad de áreas de aplicación. En general, los componentes COTS son componentes de software que proveen una funcionalidad específica, que están disponibles en el mercado para ser adquiridos e integrados dentro de otros sistemas de software. Los beneficios potenciales de esta tecnología son principalmente la reducción de costes y el acortamiento del tiempo de desarrollo, a la vez que fomenta la calidad. Sin embargo, numerosos retos que van desde problemas técnicos y legales deben ser afrontados para adaptar las actividades tradicionales de ingeniería de software para explotar los beneficios del uso de COTS para el desarrollo de sistemas.Actualmente, existe un incrementalmente enorme mercado de componentes COTS; así, una de las actividades más críticas en el desarrollo de sistemas basados en COTS es la selección de componentes que deben ser integrados en el sistema a desarrollar. La selección está básicamente compuesta de dos procesos principales: La búsqueda de componentes candidatos en el mercado y su posterior evaluación con respecto a los requisitos del sistema. Desafortunadamente, la mayoría de los métodos existentes para seleccionar COTS, se enfocan en el proceso de evaluación, dejando de lado el problema de buscar los componentes en el mercado. La búsqueda de componentes en el mercado no es una tarea trivial, teniendo que afrontar varias características del mercado de COTS, tales como su naturaleza dispersa y siempre creciente, cambio y evolución constante; en este contexto, la obtención de información de calidad acerca de los componentes no es una tarea fácil. Como consecuencia, el proceso de selección de COTS se ve seriamente dañado. Además, las alternativas tradicionales de reuso también carecen de soluciones apropiadas para reusar componentes COTS y el conocimiento adquirido en cada proceso de selección. Esta carencia de propuestas es un problema muy serio que incrementa los riesgos de los proyectos de selección de COTS, además de hacerlos ineficientes y altamente costosos. Esta disertación presenta el método GOThIC (Goal- Oriented Taxonomy and reuse Infrastructure Construction) enfocado a la construcción de infraestructuras de reuso para facilitar la búsqueda y reuso de componentes COTS. El método está basado en el uso de objetivos para construir taxonomías abstractas, bien fundamentadas y estables para lidiar con las características del mercado de COTS. Los nodos de las taxonomías son caracterizados por objetivos, sus relaciones son declaradas como dependencias y varios artefactos son construidos y gestionados para promover la reusabilidad y lidiar con la evolución constante.El método GOThIC ha sido elaborado a través de un proceso iterativo de investigación-acción para identificar los retos reales relacionados con el proceso de búsqueda de COTS. Posteriormente, las soluciones posibles fueron evaluadas e implementadas en varios casos de estudio en el ámbito industrial y académico en diversos dominios. Los resultados más relevantes fueron registrados y articulados en el método GOThIC. La evaluación industrial preliminar del método se ha llevado a cabo en algunas compañías en Noruega. / The process of building software systems by assembling and integrating pre-packaged solutions in the form of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software components has become a strategic need in a wide variety of application areas. In general, COTS components are software components that provide a specific functionality, available in the market to be purchased, interfaced and integrated into other software systems. The potential benefits of this technology are mainly its reduced costs and shorter development time, while maintaining the quality. Nevertheless, many challenges ranging form technical to legal issues must be faced for adapting the traditional software engineering activities in order to exploit these benefits.Nowadays there is an increasingly huge marketplace of COTS components; therefore, one of the most critical activities in COTS-based development is the selection of the components to be integrated into the system under development. Selection is basically composed of two main processes, namely: searching of candidates from the marketplace and their evaluation with respect to the system requirements. Unfortunately, most of the different existing methods for COTS selection focus their efforts on evaluation, letting aside the problem of searching components in the marketplace. Searching candidate COTS is not an easy task, having to cope with some challenging marketplace characteristics related to its widespread, evolvable and growing nature; and the lack of available and well-suited information to obtain a quality-assured search. Indeed, traditional reuse approaches also lack of appropriate solutions to reuse COTS components and the knowledge gained in each selection process. This lack of proposals is a serious drawback that makes the whole selection process highly risky, and often expensive and inefficient. This dissertation introduces the GOThIC (Goal- Oriented Taxonomy and reuse Infrastructure Construction) method aimed at building a domain reuse infrastructure for facilitating COTS components searching and reuse. It is based on goal-oriented approaches for building abstract, well-founded and stable taxonomies capable of dealing with the COTS marketplace characteristics. Thus, the nodes of these taxonomies are characterized by means of goals, their relationships declared as dependencies among them and several artifacts are constructed and managed for reusability and evolution purposes. The GOThIC method has been elaborated following an iterative process based on action research premises to identify the actual challenges related to COTS components searching. Then, possible solutions were envisaged and implemented by several industrial and academic case studies in different domains. Successful results were recorded to articulate the synergic GOThIC method solution, followed by its preliminary industrial evaluation in some Norwegian companies.

<p>Due to changes in the economy, the Department of Defense is requiring dramatic changes in its procurement process for major systems. These changes attempt to leverage from the large quantity of commercial software that is currently on the. market. As a result, better estimating techniques are required to properly account for software reuse. For government agencies, these techniques must be understood and applied when validating and tracking contractor performance. An industry survey was performed and subsequently two techniques were evaluated. The evaluation criteria used is consistent with the attributes of the systems engineering process. This project will evaluate the two most widely used; function point analysis and rule of thumb analysis were selected for computing the cost of a specified software intensive project.</p> / Master of Science

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1998 / Town & Country Resort Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / Current changes in the way that large flight test systems are utilized have affected the industry’s methodology in both the early design phases and in the implementation of nextgeneration hardware and software. The reduction of available RF spectrum, the implementation of packet telemetry methods and systems, and a desire to implement commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware are only some of the considerations that telemetry systems integrators and product houses have to face. This paper describes how test methodology changes affect current large systems design at both government test ranges and at airframe/missile manufacturer test facilities. In addition, consideration is given to the area of increased processing power as it affects hardware and software design, the leveraging of such current and future telecommunications technology as network switch technology and compression, cross utilization, standardized technology, and the movement toward platform-independent software.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Today’s telemetry systems can reduce spectrum demand and maintain secure voice by encoding analog voice into digital data using; Continuously Variable Slope Delta Modulation ( CVSD ) format and imbedding it into a telemetry stream. The model CSC-0390 DvD system is an excellent choice in decoding digital voice, designed with flexibility, efficiency, and simplicity in mind. Flexibility in design brings forth a capability of operating on a wide variety of telemetry systems and data formats without any specialized interfaces. The utilization of 74HC series circuit technology makes this DvD system efficient in design, low cost, and lower power consumption. In addition the front panel display and control function is also is an example of Simplicity in design and operation.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The US Government originally funded the development of the Common Airborne Instrumentation System (CAIS) to address industry-wide compatibility, maintenance, and commonality issues. Although initially targeted for US Department of Defense (DoD) programs, CAIS is also being used throughout the world in many commercial applications. This paper provides a fresh look at the evolution of the CAIS concept starting with some historical background of the CAIS Program, an overview of the CAIS System Architecture and recent trends in the use of “Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS)” products and technology.

Approved for public release; distribution in unlimited. / This thesis represents a cross Systems Command (NAVSEA/NAVAIR) developed product. The product - the Sunset Supply Base (SSB) system - provides a complete system for addressing the risks and supportability issues involved with Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) products in Navy combat and support systems. The SSB system was implemented on three Navy combat weapon systems at various phases of the product development life cycle. The main body provides to the Program Management Offices (PMO) and other decision makers, a high level summary of performance expectations. Appendix A - The Sunset Supply Base Architecture - identifies at a high level of abstraction a collaborative architecture providing a roadmap for design and development of the SSB system. Appendix B - The Systems Engineering Development and Implementation (SEDI) plan - is a prescriptive or "How to" manual describing activities that have been used to successfully implement the SSB system. Appendix C - Business Case Analysis (BCA) - presents the data collected as a result of SEDI plan implementation then addresses the business/programmatic attributes showing the viability and value proposition possible through the SSB system. Appendix D - The Marketing Plan for the SSB system - defines methods and practices necessary to establish the SSB system as the alternative of choice. / Chemical Engineer, United States Navy / Systems Engineer, United States Navy