AN HLA BASED FLIGHT SIMULATION ARCHITECTURE

Modern distributed simulation concepts such as the US DoD High Level Architecture (HLA) support interoperability between heterogeneous simulations, thus enabling the development of flexible, re-usable simulation Federations. Based on the principles of HLA, the Dutch national collaborative project 'SIMULTAAN', has extended this concept to the simulation component level. An individual simulation, participating in a Federation, can itself be composed of various Components interacting through the same architecture and underlying infrastructure as the overall Federation. Thus, Federates participating in a Federation can be viewed as a Federation of Components. The Federation of Components is represented to the Federation of Federates by a specific Component known as Federate Manager. This 'gateway' provides protection of (restricted) Component data-traffic and also reduces wide area network bandwidth requirements. This paper discusses the SIMULTAAN Simulator Architecture (SSA) and its application in the development of a component based Flight Simulator. SSA Federates communicate via a data-exchange middle-ware layer, called the Run-time Communication Infrastructure (RCl). The RCl is currently based on the HLA Run-Time Interface (RTl), but allows the use of other standards as well. The innovative approach of the SSA is that the RCl extends the Federate interoperability concepts of HLA by providing data-exchange between SSA Components in a similar way. With this approach the RCl abstracts components from the intra-SSA Federate protocol and network hardware. © 2000 TNO-FEL. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.