Distributed object visualization for sensor-driven systems

Many sensor-driven systems, such as those for avionics mission computing and for manufacturing process control, have stringent timing requirements for processing sensor data. Furthermore, many of these systems manage multiple sources of sensor simultaneously. Our previous work has shown that sensor-driven systems can be implemented efficiently and predictably using a real-time CORBA Event Service. This approach allows designers of real-time systems to leverage the benefits of flexible and open distributed computing architectures, such as those defined in the CORBA specification, while still meeting real-time requirements for efficiency, scalability, and predictability. To build and manage these types of systems, application developers and test engineers must be able to monitor and visualize the systems' real-time behavior. This paper describes how we have extended our distributed object visualization environment (DOVE) framework to monitor the timing behavior of a real-time application that generates and processes two separate streams of simulated sensor data events. The principal contributions of this paper are: (1) applying the DOVE framework to a simulated sensor-driven application, (2) extending the DOVE framework to support new application requirements, and (3) demonstrating and visualizing quality of service (QoS) control for multiple event streams within a real-time CORBA Event Service.