| Dedicated Systems e-Magazine Q1 - 2005 |
| New articles will be added to this Q1 e-Magazine until 31/03/2005. Don't hesitate to come back. |
| Cases |
| Surgery when Hope is Gone |
Situation: Surgical operation room in hospital or outpatient clinic; a brain surgeon looking at CT scans for reference and real-time X-Ray images for positioning the X-Ray beam; a nervous patient and a nurse standing by with tranquilizer injection to calm the patient and reduce head movement.
In medical devices and equipment, system reliability is critical. But the other trends in medical system design and applications include connectivity from the equipment or device to the hospital or laboratory data systems. And, many times the embedded medical application requires a high-end GUI for the human machine interface. Accuray makes the CyberKnife© - an ultra accurate automated surgical XRay system for reducing tumors and lesions. KUKA Controls' software is used to link the motion control system that positions the X-Ray gun to the visual imaging system that tracks the exact location of the tumor or lesion. The KUKA Control software extension allows Windows XP to be added to Wind River VxWorks or Windows CE on the same processor and eliminates the need for a second system, yet adds all the functionality, application and connectivity of Windows to the system.
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| John Patchin is an Applications Specialist for KUKA Controls. A Professional Engineer in the State of Michigan, Patchin joined KUKA as the CeWin and VxWin customer application support engineer in 2004. He has worked in the field of industrial motion control, CNC and Robotics since 1995. Patchin earned his B.S. degree in 1993 and an M.S. degree in 1995 in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kansas. He is also an Eagle Scout. |
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| Tools |
| Introducing formal methods into industry using Cleanroom and CSP |
| In this paper, we present an overview of our observations and experiences of applying formal methods in an industrial setting and incorporating them into a practical software development process. This work has developed from an ongoing collaboration between the two authors coming from opposite ends of the spectrum and sharing a mutual interest in bridging the gap between academic research in formal methods and their current lack of use in the software industry. We explore a number of observations as to why, despite their need in industry and their strong presence in academia, formal methods are not widely exploited in practice. The problem we are interested in is the use of formal methods to develop software systems of a business-critical and untestable nature, where the software forms an essential part of some core product or service offered by a business. We argue that the successful implementation of such systems needs a more formal approach. We present a brief overview of our use of two formal approaches, Cleanroom Software Engineering Method [MDL87] and CSP [Hoa85, Ros98] (together with its model checker FDR [Ros94]) and how they can be applied in practice, together with a summary of results achieved on a business-critical industrial project so far. |
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Guy H. Broadfoot
Chief Technical Director
and
Dr. P. J. Hopcroft
Verum Consultants |
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| Putting the Pieces Together - The Promise of Mixed Language Programming |
| Implementations that mix Ada, C, and C++ provide the high-reliability and safety critical benefits of Ada plus the advantages of using standard building blocks such as real-time operating systems(RTOS), networking stacks and advanced display systems, all typically implemented in C. Increasingly common since 1997 when the US DoD relaxed its Ada-only mandate, mixed language programming brings unique integration and debugging challenges. This paper discusses tools that can help developers visualize, analyze and debug device software that mixes GNAT Ada, C and C++. It provides practical examples based on RTI ScopeTools and Wind River’s VxWorks RTOS. |
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Paul Parkinson
Senior Systems Architect, Wind River
Pauline Shulman
Senior Product Manager, Real-Time Innovations, Inc.
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