The Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a newly adopted open specification from the Object Management Group (OMG), a group of around 800 members, for data-centric publish/subscribe communications in real-time systems. These include applications in aerospace and defence, distributed simulation, industrial automation, distributed control, robotics, telecom, and networked consumer electronics.
The publish-subscribe model connects anonymous information producers (publishers) with information consumers (subscribers). The overall distributed application consists of processes, each running in a separate address space and even on different computers. The API and quality of service (QoS) are chosen to balance predictable real-time behaviour and implementation efficiency/performance.
The specification provides a platform independent model (PIM) that can then be mapped into a variety of platform specific models (PSMs) and programming languages.