TRW

MILSTAR Satellite

United States Air Force

Advanced EHF Systems Definition Program

JOVIAL to C++

History: Lockheed Martin was awarded a contract by the US Air Force to begin development of the next generation military communications satellite. TRW, a major sub-contractor for Lockheed Martin, began the System Development and Demonstration (SDD) phase of Advanced EHF (Extremely High Frequency). To achieve new higher data rate modes and simplify maintenance, the system's JOVIAL code required modernization. TRW contracted TSRI to assist in this effort.

Challenge: MILSTAR satellite system was written in J3 JOVIAL, a software language widely used by the Air Force for high performance mission critical embedded applications. The legacy JOVIAL code into modern platform-independent C/C++. Initially, a manual rewrite of the 143,000-line MILSTAR JOVIAL code was scheduled to take more than 12 months. To reduce the project's schedule and mitigate technical risk, TRW contracted TSRI to use their unique capabilities for automated legacy transformation.

Transformation of JOVIAL requires assurance that the semantics of operations are perfectly preserved, the state of computation is accurate to the bit level, and the control flow is correct in the presence of real-time interrupts. TSRI's software engineers and automated technologies were up to these challenges.

Results: TSRI implemented the project in three incremental releases, successfully migrating the application's logic from a JOVIAL to a C++ environment. The MILSTAR software upgrade was completed in less than 30 calendar days. Initial acceptance testing, for which the customer had budgeted 8 weeks, was completed in a single day. TSRI completed final adjustments in less than two additional weeks.

By its use of TSRI's automated modernization, TRW was able to begin software performance upgrades 10 months earlier than they scheduled in the original project. The MILSTAR satellite system carrying the TRW/TSRI upgrade of its primary control system was launched in 2004 and is now successfully providing enhanced communications to the United States Armed Forces.