Lockheed finds Rhapsody vital in JSF programme

According to I-Logix, its Rhapsody visual application development environment played a vital role in the development of the award winning prototype of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).

According to I-Logix, its Rhapsody visual application development environment played a vital role in the development of the award winning prototype of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).

The Lockheed Martin Aeronautics division incorporated Rhapsody and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for a significant portion of software development of the aircraft, resulting in a major improvement in productivity.

The selection of Lockheed Martin, teamed with Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems, to develop and then produce the JSF aircraft was announced on the 26th October 2001.

Lockheed is now working to deliver the next phase of the programme, system development and demonstration (SDD).

Lockheed is committed to the continued use of Rhapsody, as it will play a key role within the software development process of the aircraft.

The awarded contract for the production of an aircraft to be used by the US Air Force, Navy, and Marines, as well as the United Kingdom's Royal Air Force and Navy, totalled just under $20 billion.

"I-Logix is thrilled that Rhapsody has been selected to play such a major role in the development of the JSF", said Gene Robinson, President and CEO of I-Logix.

"We are dedicated to a continued relationship in which I-Logix will aid Lockheed in automating their software development process.

Rhapsody allows Lockheed teams to share models, exchange specifications, and test and validate designs, thus expediting the development process and increasing productivity".

Lockheed selected Rhapsody, a UML-based application development environment, for use during SDD.

Rhapsody provides an iterative development process, enabling the developer to analyse, model, design, implement and verify the behaviour of the embedded systems software.

The ability to test the application up front eliminates much of the risk associated with manual development and coding, along with shortening the overall development time.

Key to the selection of Rhapsody is its open architecture, allowing interfaces to a number of best-of-breed complimentary development tools including requirements traceability, configuration management, testing, debugging, and integrated development environments.

"Lockheed Martin Aeronautics applied Rhapsody and UML for much of the work done on the winning JSF proposal", said George Rice, Lockheed Martin JSF development environments architect, "and plans to expand its use now that the award has been won.

Lockheed Martin found that Rhapsody improved quality, shortened design cycles, and improved overall productivity".

Lockheed plans to expand its use of the Rhapsody visual programming environment for development and delivery of the JSF aircraft.

By generating complete production quality code from design models, Rhapsody shifts the focus of work from coding to design, with significant improvements in total productivity.

Rhapsody provides an efficient design-level debugging capability that enhances and surpasses traditional source-level debugging strategies.

Rhapsody saves time by eliminating much of the tedious, time-consuming, manual and error prone steps in the software development process.

As a result, Rhapsody allows increased focus on software design while actually reducing cycle times.

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