Use Of Commercial Off The Shelf Components Research Articles

Problems With COTS Software: A Case Study

This article reports on the use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software for developing a dynamic environment for an online public access catalogue (OPAC). COTS products are widely used throughout the industry. While there are many potential benefits, use of COTS components is also fraught with pitfalls. The research on creating a dynamic environment for OPACs is based on the previous work in this area, Public Access Catalogue Extension (PACE), which was developed with custom-based software programs. Although in the previous research project all the programs were successfully developed in C and C++, the present project relied very little on original and custom programming. Instead, a number of COTS products were used to construct the dynamic environment: Macromedia Director, 3D Dreams, Extreme 3D, Crossroads, and Easybase. These COTS products were chosen for their ability to produce the desired results, their availability at reasonable costs, and their capability to integrate with one another. A small experimental database with one hundred MARC records was constructed in Easybase. Models were built in Extreme 3D and converted to 3D Studio using Crossroads. These models were used in 3D Dreams to create three-dimensional environments for use in Macromedia Director.

COTS-Based High-Data-Throughput Acquisition System for a Real-Time Reflectometry Diagnostic

Achieving higher levels of plasma performance control in present fusion experiments requires that diagnostics be upgraded to deliver processed physical parameters in real time (RT). A key element in a diagnostic RT upgrade is the data-acquisition system (DAS) that should be capable of delivering the acquired data to the data-processing resources with very low latencies and in the shortest possible time. Adequate standard commercial solutions with these characteristics are not easily found in the market, which leads most of the time to the development of complex custom high-performance designs from ground-up. A mixed solution, partially based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components has been developed to upgrade the existing ASDEX upgrade broadband reflectometry diagnostic so that a full demonstration of plasma position control using RT reflectometry density profile measurements can be performed. The designed 8-channel (12-bit/105 MSPS) DAS features a PCI Express 1.1 (PCIe) x8 interface to enable direct memory access (DMA) data transfers with an effective throughput in excess of 1 GB/s. The use of COTS components resulted in a faster hardware design cycle without compromising system performance and flexibility. The architecture of the system and its main design constraints are herein discussed. Benchmark results for data throughput and overall latency measurements are also presented.

Suitability analysis of commercial off-the-shelf components for space application

With the rapid development of microelectronics technology and the increasing requirement of high performance in space missions, existing space-level radiation-hardened components and technology cannot meet the design of high-performance spacecraft. More and more commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components are widely used in some space missions to achieve high performance. However, COTS components are designed working in terrestrial operating conditions, and the electronic components used in spacecraft usually have a much higher reliability and suitability requirement because of the nature of space missions. Therefore, the successful use of COTS components in space applications is closely related to reliability and suitability issues, which have to be considered before using COTS parts in the harsh environment in space. This article summarizes the state-of-the-art COTS components suitable for space applications, discusses the problems and risks of using COTS components in space, and presents a suitability analysis approach for COTS components in Chinese space projects. The approach consists of analysis, tests, and evaluation of thermal environment, vibration and shock environment, radiation environment, and vacuum environment. In order to illustrate the usage of the approach, two examples have been selected as case studies. One is the Chinese SZ-4 spaceship with a COTS part AD595 and the other is a joint space project between the Europe Space Agency and the Chinese National Space Administration, which is called the Double-Star Project, with a COTS part MAX471.

3.5.4 A COTS‐Aware Requirements Engineering Process: a Goal‐ and Agent‐oriented Approach

AbstractThe goals of developing systems better, faster, and cheaper continue to drive software engineering practitioners and researchers to investigate software engineering methodologies. In requirements engineering, the focus has been on modeling the software engineering process and products for systems that are being built from scratch. As the size and complexity of systems continues to grow the use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) components is being viewed as a solution. Effective use of COTS components, however, requires a systematic approach that provides both a set of concepts for modeling the subject matter and a set of guidelines for using such concepts. In particular, the process needs to recognize and address the people oriented problems including the identification and resolution of conflicting goals, bridging the gaps between stated requirements and ‘approximately fitting’ components while still satisfying the customer. In this paper, we present a goal and agent oriented requirements engineering process model that explicitly addresses the use of COTS components. More specifically, we present (part of) our model for a COTS‐Aware Requirements Engineering (CARE) process and illustrate it using a Digital Library System.