Object-oriented applications in a rapid prototyping environment

This paper describes a distributed, scalable hardware and software architecture that is being used to support a rapidly reconfigurable flight simulator (part-mission, part-task). The simulator is used by a cockpit design team to quickly evaluate competing design alternatives. It provides details of the software environment and the development of a cockpit display application is traced from design through integration. The architecture is composed of three software layers to provide the user/programmer with a simplified standard interface for integrating applications into a flight simulation. The first layer controls the overall operation of the simulation, provides control and object management functions, and provides messages through message queues to the applications. The second layer is made up of standard applications that are common to most cockpits. The majority of these applications are tailored through configuration files for the applicable cockpit. The third layer consists of applications that are aircraft/cockpit-specific components that define the functions for each unique configuration such as display formats. This architecture provides a data flow approach to modeling a simulation that treats groups of data as objects and routes these objects between machines as needed. This architecture lends itself to the development of object-oriented software applications (cockpit designs) which can be easily modified and maintained