Command and Control

The Client

A company that provides a wide range of EW, SIGINT, infrared (IR) passive warning systems and C4ISR technological solutions. An international designer, developer, manufacturer, and integrator of advanced system solutions for air, sea and land deployment.

The Client’s Needs

Our client has been chosen by an important foreign company to develop several units of a complex EW and SIGINT system. The units needed to communicate with several managing controllers developed at the same time by another company in the client’s country. The client’s needs were threefold:

a. To quickly and correctly develop multiple interfaces between their units and the foreign company’s controllers.

b. To test the developed interfaces while development of other communication side was still under way.

c. To supply the foreign company with tools to test their own side of the interface while it was developed as well as documents describing the interfaces data and behavior defined by the client.

The Solution

In conjunction with client’s personnel, Adi Mainly Software modelled the interfaces between the developed units and the controllers in the ICD16 at their premises. Once the interface data was modelled, it was used to:

a. Generate C# code for the developers of all the units

b. Generate the data for the simulators for testing the EW units

c. Generate the data for the simulators for testing the controllers

d. Generate the relevant sections of the IDD documents

Due to the sensitive nature of the project and the logistics involved, the ICD server could not be shared with the foreign company (which would be the ideal scenario). Instead it was decided to periodically export the relevant part of the ICD Database and send it via secured channels to the remote company’s offices where it was imported as is into their own ICD Database. Once the database was imported, it was possible to generate code and reports that were consistent with the ones generated by the client.

ActivityTool
Defining data of interfaces between multiple EW units ⇔ ControllersICD16
Exporting database from Elisra and importing at remote companyICD16 Admin
Generating IDD reports from interface dataICD16
Generating code for EW units and all simulatorsFiles Generation
Implementation of EW units interfacesAMF framework + C# generations
Functional and black box testing of EW units interfaces implementationSimulator
Functional and black box testing of controllers side interfaces implementationSimulator
Customizing simulators to handle complex dynamic data of messages and message header wrapping and strippingTesting Tool

The Results

The benefits of using the tools in the development process were evident from the beginning. The developers were able to rely on a substantial amount of automatic generated code in the software of the EW units. This in turn ensured consistency with the IDD as well as with the simulators that were supplied by Adi, further ensuring correct development and testing. Using SBASE framework allowed quick development of all simulators, despite complex dynamic messages and frequent changes of protocol, making them available for testing at a very early stage in the development of the EW units and controllers.

The value of uniformity between IDD, code and simulators, was further emphasized at the integration stages. Because it took time to establish a proper logistic channel for transferring the ICD database to the remote location, the company developing the controllers could not benefit from code generation from the start and consequently there were many errors in their interface data conversion that were only discovered at first integration causing a considerable waste of time. In addition, where ICD database was not used to generate the IDD but instead copied from it, there were quite a few errors of transcription, further lengthening integration process.

Development groups using the tools in full, managed to make their development process more efficient and less error prone than that of groups that were reluctant, or unable to completely leverage the power of the tools.