Major Areas of Opportunity - Implications of Emerging Micro-and Nanotechnologies - page 58

appropriate weapons platform. Sensor feedback on battle damage must be as-
sessed and intelligence data updated.

Software and Codesign

Software and integration with hardware are serious and growing problems.
There are significant issues related to software complexity, stability, reliability,
security, and adaptability. The Air Force will require a very complex software
overlay for assimilating terabits of data from a large number of sensors in a
rapidly changing environment and intelligently distilling the resulting informa-
tion for users as varied as commanders and autonomous platforms. Fundamental
questions must be answered about the limits of robustness and stability in such a
system.
Future embedded systems will be software-dominated. “Our technological
environment will become, step by step, more and more networked, more and
more autonomous, and more and more self-organizing.” 91 The industry perspec-
tive on the migration of software technologies is illustrated in Figure 3-9.

Agent-Based
Development

Productivity

Component-Based
Development

Object-Oriented
Development

Structured
Programming

Industrial
Practice

Applied
Research

Basic
Research

Time

Design
Method SASD UML ADL ???

COBOL, C
Fortran, Ada

Smalltalk,
C++

C++,
Java

Aggets?

Language

System
Organization

N-ter
Distibuted

Mainframe Client-Server Self-Organizing

1970 1990 2000 2005

FIGURE 3-9 Paradigm shifts in software. SOURCE: ITEA Office Association. 2001.
Technology Roadmap on Software Intensive Systems: The Vision of ITEA (SOFTEC
Project), March. Available online at <http://www.itea-office.org> [July 31, 2002]. © 2001,
ITEA Office Association. All rights reserved.