Standards Expertise
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-178C Level A.