Capability Driven Architecture (CDA, Patent Pending) originated with Army Aviation to solve a very difficult problem. TES was tasked to develop the ability to integrate various devices onto four different aircraft architectures while reducing development and life cycle costs. Tucson Embedded Systems (TES) successfully developed and proved CDA for radio control as CDA Radio Control (CDA-RC) for military rotorcraft systems.

The Capability Driven Architecture (CDA, patent pending) design provides a common interface to a category of similar devices, much like desktop computer applications have a common interface to the myriad of computer printers and other peripherals.  Currently, safety-critical applications have nothing similar for integrating equipment.

Tucson Embedded Systems developed middleware to facilitate the CDA, patent pending, concept:

CDA-OE is the Operating Environment (OE) layer for Windows, Linux, LynxOS, Integrity and VxWorks. The same codeset is compiled for each operating system, increasing fidelity and reuse. To remain platform independent, the implementation code does not communicate directly with the operating system or hardware.  Instead, the implementation accesses OS services and other protocols, such as threads and timer services or IO protocols, through the standard interfaces defined in the CDA-OE abstraction layer.

CDA-DDS is the Data Distribution Services (DDS) layer providing data and meta-data transport services, ensuring deterministic storage and retrieval of valuable system data. CDA-DDS provides the backbone and foundation for all of the interfaces between devices and platform applications in the system. CDA, patent pending, minimizes the data coupling between software components and provides support for various languages (C++, Ada, and Java). CDA-DDS was modeled after the Object Management Group (OMG) DDS.  The roadmap includes making CDA OMG DDS compliant and provides some significant enhancements to OMG DDS to support hard real-time systems and for low-bandwidth and disconnected network operation.

The primary features of CDA-DDS are:

• Scalable data sharing
• Fault-tolerance and “hand-offs” fail-over
• Data localization
• Data persistence by storing the data to a “disk”
• Quality of Service (QoS), and
• Security support for data

CDA-Framework supports simplified application development by providing the middleware extensions for common application development.

The Computer Industry is increasingly interconnected. The CDA, patent pending, architecture can be applied to all capabilities including communications, navigational, sensors, actuators, etc. While architectures exist that can claim software reuse, few, if any, can claim software reuse for safety/mission critical applications. CDA, patent pending, eliminates ad hoc development and stovepipe systems resulting in duplication of effort across the various platforms for integrating the same type of equipment.