The challenge of the increased use of COTS: a developer's perspective

Standard hardware performance and cost concerns are increasingly driving designers of real-time systems toward the use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components. There are many difficulties with this transition yet there is a perceived lack of interest in the subject. It is speculated that the community is not fully aware of the problems being encountered in utilizing COTS components. This paper describes some of the difficulties system designers face, using experiences from on-going efforts to transition a large real-time system, the AEGIS Weapons System (AWS), to a distributed compute plant built with COTS.<>