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Cummins Adopts ADI's BEACON Safety-Critical Technologies

27 April 1999

Cummins Adopts ADI's BEACON Safety-Critical Technologies For Developing Diesel Engine Controllers

    ANN ARBOR, Mich., April 27 -- Applied Dynamics International
(ADI) today announced that its BEACON software technology has been selected by
Cummins Engine Company (Columbus, IN) as the primary development tool for the
next generation of embedded electronic engine control application software.
Cummins' expects significant improvements with software reuse across many of
their embedded applications including most of Cummins' medium and heavy-duty
diesel engine electronic controllers.  BEACON enhances the quality of Cummins'
software detailed designs, code, and unit test coverages by providing a
graphical design package, fixed-point C code generator, and Automatic Unit
Test Tool (AUTT) suitable for developing high-integrity embedded software.
    "BEACON was an excellent fit into the current Cummins production embedded
software development environment and configuration management system," said
David Redding, Controls Team Manager at Cummins.  "The BEACON technology
enables the adoption of a disciplined software design process where software
detailed design documentation is a product of the production process and not
an afterthought.  Initial results have indicated significant improvement in
both software design quality and development cost for the production software
process.  Additionally, analysis indicates BEACON should greatly improve
software reuse attributed to the graphical representation of software
algorithms designed with BEACON."
    Using BEACON's design analysis features and fixed-point C code generators,
Cummins will more efficiently translate control and monitoring algorithms into
production software.  BEACON's AUTT plays a key role with automation of
software unit testing and strengthens the overall test verification strategy.
AUTT provides a rigorous suite of unit test vectors that allow Cummins to
fully exercise the software instructions in the target environment, thus
identifying errors well before expensive integration and system level testing.
The graphical representation of control and monitoring algorithms, automated
code generation, and streamlined unit testing greatly reduces software life-
cycle costs.
    "Cummins' decision to adopt BEACON shows again that safety-critical
software development methods are not restricted to jet engines, pacemakers,
and nuclear power plants," said Tom Erkkinen, ADI's BEACON Product Manager.
"Any company that desires software that is safe, reliable, and maintainable,
needs to consider safety-critical development practices, especially those that
provide significant levels of process automation."
    In developing controller software, a Cummins software engineer first uses
BEACON to develop a detailed software design using signal flow and control
flow diagrams.  The BEACON design analyzer is then invoked to ensure that a
number of commonly accepted software principals have been satisfied, such as
strong data typing and single entry/exit.  If the design successfully passes
these checks, the software engineer generates code and test cases.  The test
cases are then run with the automatically produced source code to stress the
extremities of the mathematical computations and control flow expressions.
    Cummins, headquartered in Columbus, Indiana, is the world's largest
producer of diesel engines above 200 horsepower.  The company provides
products for customers in its key markets: automotive, power generation,
industrial and filtration.  Cummins reported record sales of $6.3 billion in
1998.
    Applied Dynamics International is a supplier of advanced embedded
controller design and test tools for the automotive, off-highway, aerospace,
defense and other related industries.  In addition to its Michigan
headquarters, ADI has an international office in the United Kingdom,
installations in 23 countries and representatives throughout the world.