An environment for computational steering

Computational Steering is the ultimate goal of interactive simulation: researchers change parameters of their simulation and immediately receive feedback on the effect. We present a general and flexible environment for computational steering. Within this environment a researcher can easily develop user interfaces and 2-D visualizations of his simulation. Direct manipulation is supported, and the required changes of the simulation are minimal. The architecture of the environment is based on a Data Manager that takes care of centralized data storage and event notification, and satellites that produce and visualize data. One of these satellites is a graphics tool to define a user interface interactively and to visualize the data. The central concept here is the Parametrized Graphics Object: an interface is built up from graphics objects whose properties are functions of data in the Data Manager. The scope of these tools is not limited to computational steering, but extends to many other application domains.