Industrial Applications in Ada

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From the Script: SLIDE 41 - Industrial Applications in Ada

Here are some examples of successful Ada applications in the commercial sector.

Weirton Steel Hot Mill used Ada because of its reliability. The process automation engineer credits Ada for keeping the mill running smoothly. He says, "It's because the software keeps running. It's capable of regenerating and going ahead." [Why, p.4]

An automated parts delivery system was developed for the Volvo factory using Ada. Automobile parts are delivered on small, driverless, automatically guided vehicles. They fetch requested items from the warehouse and deliver them to workers on the factory floors and these vehicles can be dynamically rerouted. [Ada at Work, p. 6-8]

Orson & Prompt are two programs written to edit videotape and run a tele-prompter. The real-time and tasking features of Ada enabled Tom Moran to write these two programs quickly and cheaply; and the encapsulation mechanisms made it easy for him to upgrade different supported hardware when he ported Orson to a Macintosh. PROMPT was a small program that made good use of Ada’s tasking ability; it was posted on the web and included in a CD-ROM of shareware. [Moran]

Astree is an effort to equip every train with systems that will automatically provide location, speed, distance, switch, operations, and safety information. The original prototype of the central system consisted of 300,000 lines of C code, which was difficult to maintain and suffered reliability problems. Because Ada is recognized for its maintainability on large, complex development projects and because safety and reliability were Astree’s two main concerns, Astree decided to start over using Ada. At present, the main Astree functions are undergoing tests in the suburbs of Paris. [Morel]

For the Helsinki radiotelescope, the tasking system was important where lots of things need to be done quickly and simultaneously; exceptions were used to recover from problematic situations; and packages were useful for keeping things orderly and for reuse of previously designed routines. [Crafts]

The CARMS tool runs in the Microsoft Windows environment. It is designed to predict reliability, maintainability, and availability of a system. Two of the big three domestic automakers and several aerospace companies are using this tool to solve a wide range of prediction-oriented problems. [Pukite]

The Project Manager of SIMULA said, “Ada was chosen because it guarantees an inexpensive and quality programming. For instance, the reusability of Ada modules significantly cut down our times and costs of development.” In addition, its reliability makes it more marketable to industry. [Ada Used to Develop a Simulator]

Originally Ada was chosen to develop the Flight Warning System of the Airbus A340 because it provides faster execution speed to the application than C or PL/M, but as the 100,000 lines of code were developed, Ada demonstrated many of its other advantages. [Ada Used for On-Board]

The Boeing 777 project had 10,000 people working on the jetliner from different internal divisions and external suppliers. The subsystems run anywhere from 70,000 to 613,000 lines of code.