An optimized distributed real-time simulation framework for high fidelity flight simulator research

Abstract

Flight simulator is among the most sophisticated software systems in existence. It is highly distributed, has rigorous timing requirements, and must be amenable to frequent updates to maintain high fidelity with the ever-changing vehicle and environment it is simulating. We proposed an optimized distributed real-time simulation framework to facilitate the high fidelity flight simulator research. It uses mediator and data bus design patterns to improve software quality and decrease communication delay. The mediator design pattern uses mediator as an information “broker” between components of a sub-system which minimizes component interdependencies, improves the extendibility for the simulator and makes the maintenance easier. Meanwhile, the data bus design pattern employs publish/subscribe communication paradigm and distributed database to facilitate data share among sub-systems which decreases the communication latency. The real-time execution components in the framework are also described in this paper. The validation methods and contrasting simulation results are presented finally to show the feasible design to carry out flight simulation with high quality and low communication latency.