Prototyping a Domain-Specific Language for Monitor and Control Systems

This paper describes a domain-specific language prototype developed for the NASA Constellation launch control system project. A key element of the launch control system architecture, the domain-specific language 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 launch control system, 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 dynamically-typed Python scripting language, and validated in a demonstration of capability required for Constellation. A study of the statically typed Scala programming language as an alternative domain-specific language implementation language is also presented.