About Us

The Company

Hamilton Technologies, Inc. (HTI)

Based in Cambridge, MA, Hamilton Technologies, Inc. (HTI) was founded in 1986. Our charter is to provide technology, products and services to modernize systems engineering and software development through innovation: maximize reliability and productivity, minimize cost and risk, and accelerate time to market.

Our markets vary from real time, Internet based, distributed to data base environments. Applications vary from manufacturing, communications, aerospace, traffic engineering, medical, energy, battlefield management and emergency management to banking and enterprise management systems; from research and development to production ready systems.

HTI has spent decades off Main Street perfecting a language together with its technology for systems and software design and software development that has been created to solve problems considered impossible to solve with traditional approaches. The result is a true paradigm-changer.

Called the Universal Systems Language (USL) (along with its automation, the 001 Tool Suite), it is a revolutionary approach to systems thinking, it is a new way of doing business. To a great extent derived from lessons learned from the Apollo onboard flight software effort, USL has evolved over several decades and taken on multiple dimensions for both Systems Engineering and Software Development. Based on HTI's Development Before the Fact (DBTF) theory, it is unique, virtually eliminating errors before the fact.

Founded in a preventive philosophy, versus the traditional, test-to-death philosophy now standard to all of today's systems and software, USL-001 has been quietly emerging from Hamilton’s company headquarters. A turn-key technology to realizing the mandate of "connecting the dots" and “doing more for less”, it has been proven in many and diverse fronts by research, development and trailblazer organizations within government, commercial and academic environments; all of whom have stress tested it against the traditional marketplace leaders: in every case, USL-001 was found to be number 1 over any and all in competition. They found that USL-001 will not just change the game; it presents an entirely new playing field.

Universal Systems Language (USL)

USL was created for designing systems with significantly increased reliability, higher productivity, and lower risk. It was designed with the following objectives in mind:

• reduce complexity and bring clarity into the thinking process;

• ensure correctness by inherent, universal, built-in language properties;

• ensure seamless integration from systems to software;

• ensure traceability and evolvability;

• develop unambiguous requirements, specifications, and design;

• ensure that there are no interface errors in a system design and its derivatives;

• maximize inherent reuse;

• ensure that every model captures real-time execution semantics (for example, asynchronous and distributed);

• establish the ability to automatically understand the behaviour of a functional specification in terms of a particular resource architecture;

• establish automatic generation of much of design, reducing the need for a designer's involvement in implementation details;

• establish a distributed substrate in which communication and scheduling of events is fully automated;

• establish automatic generation of 100 percent, fully production-ready code, from system specifications, for any kind or size of software application; and

• eliminate the need for a high percentage of testing without compromising reliability.

Together with the 001 Tool Suite, USL can address these objectives because of the systems theory that forms its foundations.

USL was originally created for defining systems in general, where the goal was to combine mathematical perfection with engineering precision. Whereas the traditional software development approach is curative, testing for errors late into the life cycle, USL's approach is preventive, not allowing errors in, in the first place. Unlike formal languages that are not friendly or practical, and friendly or practical languages that are not formal, its users consider USL to be not only formal but also practical and friendly. Unlike other mathematically based formal methods, USL extends traditional mathematics with a unique concept of control: universal real-world properties internal to its grammar‚ such as those related to time and space‚ are inherent, enabling USL to support the definition and realization of any kind or size of system.

A formalism for representing the mathematics of systems, USL is based on a set of axioms of the general systems theory, that forms USL's foundations, and formal rules for their application. Providing a mathematical framework within which objects, their interactions, and their relationships can be captured, USL's philosophy is that all objects are recursively reusable and reliable; reliable systems are defined in terms of reliable systems; only reliable systems are used as building blocks; and only reliable systems are used as mechanisms to integrate these building blocks to form a new system. Designers can then use the new system, along with more primitive ones, to define (and build) more comprehensive reliable systems. If a system is reliable, all the objects in all its levels and layers are reliable.

Unlike languages where language mechanisms, rules, and tools are added after the fact as more is learned about a class of systems, USL derives its language mechanisms and tools from its core set of primitive mechanisms. Because of this flexibility, USL can be used as it gracefully evolves as well as have the ability to lend its formal support to other languages and techniques. By inheriting its preventive philosophy, the potential exists to solve (prevent) a given problem as early in the life cycle as possible.

Products: 001 Tool Suite Design and Development Environment

USL along with its automation, the 001 Tool Suite, is used throughout a system's life cycle, for modeling systems and software; and automating much of the design and all of the software.

Major Components of 001

Analyzer: analysis of USL models

OMap Editor: graphical object editor and generator of test harnesses

Resource Allocation Tool (RAT): automated design, documentation, test and code generation

DXecutor: distributed executive and simulator

RT(x): requirements analysis tool

001 resides on UNIX and Linux platforms and is used to build applications for these platforms as well as to cross target to a variety of diverse architectures.

Services Available from HTI

HTI provides services to researchers, system designers, software developers, system integrators, tool developers and end users to

1) teach our customers how to use USL-001 to design and develop applications;

2) help our customers design and develop applications using USL-001; and

3) design and develop applications for our customers using USL-001.

References

M. Hamilton and W.R. Hackler, "Universal Systems Language: Lessons Learned From Apollo" (1.4 MB), IEEE Computer, Dec. 2008.

Key Personnel

Margaret H. Hamilton is the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. (HTI). She created the Universal Systems Language (USL) and its automation, the 001 Tool Suite; the mathematical theory upon which it is based, Development Before the Fact (DBTF); and has been responsible for many applications designed and developed with USL-001.

As Director of the Software Engineering Division at MIT's Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Hamilton led the team that created the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo command modules and lunar landing vehicles;

William R. Hackler is Director of Development at Hamilton Technologies, Inc. (HTI). He is the lead engineer for the development of the 001 Tool Suite and has been involved in the design of many aspects of the Universal Systems Language (USL).

Hackler has been the lead engineer for the design and development of numerous USL-001 applications.

The Location

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