Lockheed Martin and RTI to offer middleware for LabVIEW

Aug. 13, 2008

Sunnyvale, Calif.—August 12—Lockheed Martin's Maritime Security & Ship Systems business and Real-Time Innovations (RTI) today announced a joint effort to provide a high-performance, low-latency messaging middleware solution for National Instruments LabVIEW applications.

RTI Data Distribution Service objects are integrated using the LabVIEW drag-and-drop interface and Lockheed Martin's Middleware Adapters. With Lockheed Martin's Middleware Adapter to RTI Data Distribution Service, system designers and application developers using LabVIEW programming can incorporate low-latency messaging middleware into their designs as visual components ready to connect to other LabVIEW components. Users now can now generate code in LabVIEW from models to provide data acquisition and integration into networked applications, thereby extending the messaging capabilities of applications built using LabVIEW.

"RTI Data Distribution Service is an extremely popular and powerful messaging solution that will extend LabVIEW users' ability to distribute data in real time over heterogeneous networks with LabVIEW," said Darren Albert, staff engineer at Lockheed Martin.

Engineers can build real-time applications visually in LabVIEW by using predefined blocks representing high-level system operations and providing for data flow by configuring connector lines between those blocks. To take advantage of the RTI Data Distribution Service high-performance middleware and adapters, engineers also can construct their own custom blocks that can be integrated into the LabVIEW environment for use in building applications. This also enables engineers to leverage the power of the LabVIEW environment to display complex data graphically to users.

"Lockheed Martin, National Instruments and RTI have common customers in a variety of industries, ranging from big physics — such as astronomical telescopes — to aerospace and defense," said Dr. Stan Schneider, founder and CEO of RTI. "We are very pleased that Lockheed Martin is enabling these RTI Data Distribution Service users to design their applications in LabVIEW."