Developing the cooperative mission development environment

Abstract

The Cooperative Mission Development Environment (CMDE) was developed to unite independent applications and databases into a cooperating tool set capable of sharing data. As missions developed stand-alone tools to meet immediate needs and to automate paper functions, a proliferation of development and automation tools came into existence. It soon became apparent that data in one tool could be used by another tool and a significant improvement in productivity could be obtained by combining the tools and sharing the data between them. This paper examines: how the independent systems arose, why the need developed to integrate the independent systems, the integration approaches considered, the process used for integration, how coordination between tool developers was handled, challenges faced during integration, plus current challenges, and future plans.