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A US government initiative called the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) is currently causing a major paradigm change in how government radio systems are being designed. Although such radios have extensively employed software in the past, JTRS moves these platforms to the concept of a "Software Defined radio", where communications capabilities are installed on a standard platform much like applications are installed on a PC. The applications themselves consist of a collection of CORBA components and other libraries, and are launched by a generic application manager. The application manager's "scripts", which describe which components to launch, what hardware and processing facilities they require, and how to establish interconnections between them are specified in eXtensible Markup Language (XML).

The structure of the XML files themselves is loosely based on the Object Management Group's CORBA Component Model, and specified by the JTRS Software Communications Architecture (SCA). These configurations consist of a number of inter-related files. For example, several files may describe the characteristics of an individual component and its interfaces; whereas another file describes which components make up a superceding application, and how to configure and interconnect these components.

Manually creating, reviewing and maintaining these configuration files by hand is very costly and error prone, with a typical radio waveform being described using over 1000 - 3000 lines of XML. JVMS attempts to create a system that allows for conceptual modeling of a JTRS configuration, and provides the ability to generate the corresponding set of XML files.

The goal of JVMS is to provide a visual "CAD-like" means of creating and visualizing JTRS configurations. The integrity of the resulting model is then checked for validity against certain constraints, and the corresponding JTRS configuration files can be produced.

For more information about JTRS and the SCA, see http://jtrs.army.mil/.