Evolving the airborne warning and control system (AWACS)

We give an overview of ongoing development efforts and supporting research which is evolving the United States Air Force's Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS). AWACS is an airplane-based sensor and command and control platform with an on-board mission computing system that presents operators with sensor and other information subject to real-time quality of service requirements. The legacy mission computing system is mainframe-based and relies on a centralized, cyclic scheduling approach which makes maintenance and improvement very difficult. We briefly discuss interesting aspects of our efforts to upgrade this system to use emerging real-time distributed object technology, object management, and modern scheduling and schedulability analysis. Advance demonstrations of this upgrade have been very successful, and test flights should be underway at the time of the conference. Within this context, we give examples of technology transfer.