Development of a Prototype Domain-Specific Language for Monitor and Control Systems

This paper describes the domain-specific language (DSL) prototype developed for the NASA constellation launch control system (LCS) project. A key element of the LCS architecture, the DSL prototype is a specialized monitor and control language composed of constructs for specifying and programming test, checkout, and launch processing applications for flight and ground systems. The principal objectives of the prototyping activity were to perform a proof-of-concept of an approach to ultimately lower the lifecycle costs of application software for the LCS, and to explore mitigations for a number of development risks perceived by the project. The language has been implemented as a library that extends the Python scripting language, and validated in a successful demonstration of capability required for constellation.