TRW

Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS)

J3 JOVIAL to C++

History: The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radar system provides intercontinental and sea-launched ballistic missile detection, early warning and attack assessment. These radar systems required upgrading to allow earlier detection, closer tracking, and more intercept opportunities of attacking warheads. To support the National Missile Defense Deployment Readiness Program, TRW contracted with TSRI to demonstrate the feasibility of automated transformation technologies rather than resorting to a manual rewrite.

Challenge: BMEWS was written in J3 JOVIAL, which required modernization into C++ and Java. This upgrade would reduce operation costs, allow platform independence, and increase processing capacity. J3 JOVIAL is a powerful legacy language widely used in high performance mission critical applications with unique real-time capabilities. Modernization of the BMEWS JOVIAL into modern C++ required preservation these capabilities.

Results: TRW undertook this study to assess the schedule, cost, and risk mitigation benefits of using a highly automated approach to modernizing mission critical systems written in a real-time high-performance legacy language. TRW software engineers transformed the BMEWS JOVIAL code into C++ while running TSRI's automated toolset at their own site near Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs. The BMEWS project resulted in a 99% level of automation, far exceeding TRW's target of 80% automation. This collaboration between TRW and TSRI also demonstrated the capability to map between the high-level Rational Rose UML model of the UEWRS system and UML documentation generated automatically for the BMEWS system. System wide re-factoring operations also demonstrated the capability to automatically eliminate redundancy from the derived C++ code.

This technology assessment project established TSRI's capabilities for automated assessment, transformation and re-factoring of JOVIAL. These capabilities were later enhanced to include J73 JOVIAL. TSRI's tools and services have since been employed on other JOVIAL modernization projects, including the MILSTAR Satellite Command Control System and the F-16 Aircraft Up Front Control System.