A Management and Control Infrastructure for Integrated Real-Time Simulation Environment

This paper outlines a management and control infrastructure that integrates heterogeneous simulations into a synthetic experiment environment. Concepts and functionality of the infrastructure are discussed, and architecture design along with detailed analysis is given to illustrate its support for the whole process of conducting experiments. We consider two key challenges, time management and data exchange mechanism that support constructing the infrastructure, and propose proper design. In particular, real-time constrains satisfaction is considered as a critical problem in our work. The presented infrastructure adopts a GPS-based approach to meet high-precision time synchronization requirement, and takes DDS (Data Distribution Service) as the network middleware to implement data organization and transmission. We propose a case study to illustrate this infrastructure´s feasibility and advantages in terms of simulation integration and management issues.