Standards,
both accredited and de-facto, are a major factor in many systems today.
Development organizations need to be proactive both in standards creation and
standards maintenance. In addition, organizations must proactively ensure
that they understand the role and impact of the relevant standards to the
systems and software being created.
Many
organizations need help to monitor, create, understand, or utilize international
standards. Such organizations have found that retaining Dr.
Locke to provide guidance, or even representation on standards bodies is a
cost-effective way to provide a variety of levels of involvement in such
standards. In this way, the organizations need not divert critical
personnel from mission-critical internal efforts to influence and remain
involved in standards. They can then be in a position to get definitive
answers to the key standards questions.
For
example, when should POSIX be used? When is Linux appropriate? What
versions of POSIX and Linux are needed? What options are
appropriate? What about certification, conformance, and compliance?
Is Java ready for use in embedded systems?
Dr. Locke
has extensive experience working with a variety of standards involved in
embedded systems. Starting in
1979, he worked with several efforts involved in the creation and
standardization of the Ada language. From 1987 through 1999, he had
extensive involvement with extending Ada into full support of real-time and
safety-critical systems, culminating in the creation of Ada 95 and the
Ravenscar Ada Profile (for safety-critical systems).
Dr. Locke
was a key player in the development of the POSIX real-time standards. As a
member of the IEEE POSIX 1003.4 working group, he participated in the creation
of all parts of the real-time extensions, including execution scheduling, clocks
and timers, synchronization, asynchronous I/O, message passing, shared memory, and memory
mapping. When this effort, including both the process standard (1003.1b)
and the threads standard (1003.1c) went to ballot, Dr. Locke acted as the technical
reviewer for the Execution Scheduling chapter of each, with responsibility for the
complete draft, its rationale, and responding to all ballot comments and
objections.
Dr. Locke
helped draft, review responses, and create the Real-Time CORBA standard, and
later the CORBA Dynamic Scheduling standard.
In addition,
he served on the Expert Group of the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ)
with the Java Community Process, representing first Lockheed Martin, and then
TimeSys Corporation there. Later, when the RTSJ was completed, Dr. Locke
served as the Specification Lead for the standard for TimeSys Corporation until
he left TimeSys to found Locke Consulting LLC.
Currently under a contract with The Open Group,
Dr. Locke is serving as the Specification
Lead for the Safety Critical Java (JSR-302) standard where he is leading an
international group of experts to bring Java technology to the domain of safety
critical systems that must be certifiable under standards such as DO-178B Level
A.
