Jointly owned by BAE Systems, EADS and Finmeccanica, MBDA is the prime contractor on the six-nation Meteor missile program. Meteor is a highly maneuverable, fast, Beyond Visual Range (BVR) air-to-air weapon system capable of operation by night or day, in all weather and in dense electronic warfare environments.

The Seeker software design on Meteor, the most complex part of the missile, required engineers to take existing C code, re-purpose it and generate new functionality in Ada 95.

According to MBDA: "We looked at tools from several vendors and were immediately attracted by ARTiSAN Studio's excellent support for real-time software engineering and the strong integration with other software tools.

Other factors influencing the decision-making process were its support for code generation for both Ada and C and the ability to combine them within the same UML model. ARTiSAN's continuing commitment to Ada and UML development was also an important factor in the selection."

An additional factor in the selection of ARTiSAN Studio was the ability of the tools to bring together the electronics and software components of the project design. The Hardware Architecture Diagram provided an intuitive view of the Electronics Architecture enabling the hardware engineers to readily define the bus interfaces, memory maps and details of how the electronics interfaced to the software.

Jeremy Goulding, President and CEO of ARTiSAN commented, "MBDA was extremely attracted to ARTiSAN's support for multiple languages within a single model, and particularly our pedigree with and support for Ada. Our continued commitment to support an Ada oriented process with UML2 and SysML modeling tools is a direct result of coupling the need to add the latest standards-based functionality, together with addressing the long-term support needs of our customers on major defense programs."

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