Lockheed Martin (LMCO)

US Navy

P-3C Orion

Signal Processing Suite

Ada to C++:

History: Designed primarily as an anti-submarine warfare platform, the P-3C Orion is being modernized to keep pace with multi-mission requirements. The Acoustic Signal Processor (ASP) is a mission-critical software system that processes signals to the acoustic operator in determining whether a sound is produced by random ocean noise or by a submarine. To preserve the US Navy investment in this highly reliable embedded system required software modernization, moving from its legacy Ada into platform independent C++. This modernization needed to comply with the US Navy's architectural requirements by achieving modern software development compatibility, reducing long-term maintenance and supporting future enhancements.

After careful analysis of alternatives, Lockheed selected TSRI's fixed-price automated software modernization (ASM) for the lowest technical risk, lowest cost and most timely modernization option. Lockheed awarded TSRI a sole source contract as the only viable provider of 100% automated Ada to C++ transformation.

Challenge: The ASP was written in Ada, an implementation language with increasingly limited commercial platform choices and software development support. Ascendance of modern high-performance platform-neutral languages, such as C++ and Java, has made the cost of maintaining Ada programs prohibitive. As a result Ada has increasingly fallen out-of-favor as a DoD implementation language. With over 20 years of fine-tuning and incremental improvements, the ASP was a high quality information system well worth preserving, but it required the C++ migration of nearly 500,000 lines of highly complex mission-critical Ada code and 400,000 lines of comments. The modern ASP C++ system needed to compile, link and execute perfectly. Ada is a highly complex, strongly typed language with language constructs such as generics, tasking, parameterized name associations, position parameter matching, aggregate assignments and variant records. Ada language constructs have very complex semantics and are difficult to replicate in C++ with perfect accuracy.

Results: Minor modifications to TSRI's JANUS™ toolset adjusted its Ada to C++ transformation capabilities for the P-3C ASP code. Following these adjustments, TSRI achieved a 100% automated transformation of ASP on a dual processor 8-GB 64-bit Opteron. The automatically generated C++ compiled and linked 100% error-free. Because complex test requirements required real-time simulation and a classified test-bed, LMCO went on to complete system integration and testing with remote support from TSRI.