Carnegie Mellon (Robotics Institute)
1996 – 1999 OZONE / AMC Barrel Allocator
Mission planning software for the US Air Force (DARPA)
By the end of my university studies I had focused on primarily two aspects of software development: scheduling software and user interface design and implementation. Fittingly my first job at CMU was to implement a user interface for the OZONE scheduling framework and (more precisely) the AMC Barrel Allocator.
The Barrel Allocator was a project for the United States Air Force and was financed by DARPA. The problem to solve was the mission planning done by the Air Mobility Command (AMC) in St. Louis. The user interface demands ranged from simple reports in text format, to table views, to Gantt charts and all the way to maps that were interactive.
I was solely responsible for the design, the implementation, and the backend integration of the UI. This task was especially difficult since the UI had to be done in Java, which was fairly new and immature at that time (1996). The biggest problem of Java 1.0 was the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) as it was technically far behind its time. Another problematic area was the inter-process communication between Java UI and Lisp scheduling engine.
OZONE Splash Frame (Image
courtesy of Boeing)