April 2003
Intermediate to advanced
560 pages
16h 53m
English
Content preview from Software Architecture in Practice, Second Edition
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Chapter 6. Air Traffic Control: A Case Study in Designing for High Availability
The FAA has faced this problem [of complexity] throughout its decade-old attempt to replace the nation's increasingly obsolete air traffic control system. The replacement, called Advanced Automation System, combines all the challenges of computing in the 1990s. A program that is more than a million lines in size is distributed across hundreds of computers and embedded into new and sophisticated hardware, all of which must respond around the clock to unpredictable real-time events. Even a small glitch potentially threatens public safety.
—W. Wayt Gibbs [Gibbs 94]
Air traffic control (ATC) is among the most demanding of all software applications. It is hard real ...