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Modular Gateway Architectures Study (MGAS)

Award Information
Agency: Department of Defense
Branch: Air Force
Contract: FA8750-04-C-0136
Agency Tracking Number: F041-089-0839
Amount: $99,999.00
Phase: Phase I
Program: SBIR
Solicitation Topic Code: AF04-089
Solicitation Number: 2004.1
Timeline
Solicitation Year: 2004
Award Year: 2004
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): 2004-04-26
Award End Date (Contract End Date): 2005-01-26
Small Business Information
6 New England Executive Park
Burlington, MA 01803
United States
DUNS: 094841665
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
Principal Investigator
 Mark Keaton
 Lead Research Engineer
 (781) 273-3388
 mkeaton@alphatech.com
Business Contact
 John Barry
Title: Contracts Manager
Phone: (781) 273-3388
Email: jbarry@alphatech.com
Research Institution
N/A
Abstract

Our SBIR goals include 1) assessing architectural alternatives for future interoperability gateways that facilitate component testing, certification, and reuse, and 2) taking initial steps to implement selected alternatives. Historically, interoperability gateways required each link interface to implement translation rules for all other supported links types, yielding an O(N2) maintenance, testing, and certification problem. More recent architectures (e.g. our XML-Defined Gateway) incorporate a neutral data format to remove link interdependencies, so that link interfaces need only support translations between its native format and the neutral format. This allows testing and certifying interface implementations individually, and assembling gateways from pre-certified interface modules: i.e., a toolbox architecture. Although attractive, a neutral format approach has the overlooked problem of generating translation rules between neutral and native formats that are complete and consistent with MIL-STD rules expressed only in native formats. We propose to design automated approaches for: decomposing native-to-native translation rules into native-to-neutral and neutral-to-native translation rules; verifying the original rules are mathematically correct compositions of the decomposed rules; and identifying when translation rules from different rule sets induce inconsistencies. We also propose to extend the engineering cost model developed under our previous SBIR to compare architectural trades and select the best overall approach.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

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