Sandia’s JESS® 7.1a3 rule engine selected by Lockheed Martin for Navy’s DDG 1000 destroyer ship

Monday, January 28, 2008

Sandia's Jess® rule engine will play a critical role with advanced technologies and features on the Navy's DDG 1000 destroyer ships, such as the one shown here.

According to Dr. Greg Harrison, a Lockheed systems engineer, the company chose Jess after extensive and multiple trade studies confirmed the software’s ability to interface with the information in the DDG 1000 knowledgebase. “I feel confident that we made the right choice with Jess,” says Harrison.

Jess was licensed by Lockheed Martin Simulation, Training & Support (STS), a business unit within the company’s Electronics Systems business area. STS is a leader in the development of logistics solutions and military training and simulation, producing air, ground and maritime systems for customers worldwide.

Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory.

The Navy’s DDG 1000 is a multi-mission, maritime fleet of destroyer ships. It includes a number of advanced technologies and features, including an integrated power system, dual band radar, integrated undersea warfare system, and advanced gun system. Among other intended uses, Jess will help the DDG 1000 ship domain controller with its alarm management function and reasoning about ship system states for safe operation.

Jess enables software developers to embed intelligence in the form of business rules directly into their Java TM applications. Rules-driven programming, says Sandia software licensing manager Craig Smith, allows software to express real-world concepts in a natural, expressive way that helps business and IT professionals collaborate in bringing enterprise applications to life.

Among Jess’s latest features is an integrated development environment (IDE) for rules that increases programmer productivity and enhances collaboration. The IDE is based on the award-winning Eclipse TM platform (www.eclipse.org) and features tools for creating, editing, visualizing, monitoring and debugging rules.

Jess is the only enterprise-capable rule engine to offer both the convenience of an IDE and an unprecedented level of flexibility and openness that makes it easy for developers to add the power of heuristic rules into applications that run on everything from handheld devices to enterprise servers. Jess supports the industry-standard JSR94 Java Rule Engine API as well as its own rich interface. Jess executes rules written both in its own expressive rule language and in XML.

Jess is licensed commercially and is being used in enterprise applications at dozens of Fortune 500 companies, including many in the finance, insurance, security, transportation, and manufacturing sectors. Sandia also offers Jess licenses to academic and government institutions. Jess (along with the textbook Jess in Action) is used as a teaching tool at hundreds of universities around the globe.

Binary versions of Jess are available on a 30-day trial evaluation basis. Any other use of Jess, including commercial, internal, government, R&D and no-fee academic/student use, requires a license.

Source: Sandia National Laboratories