Terrain page scheduling in flight simulation based on branch-and-bound search

To address the issue of unpractical and inefficient terrain page searching in terrain scheduling of flight simulations, we studied the scheduling problem for further optimization. Firstly the page format organization using the holding-boundary idea was introduced, which well disposed of the rendering sub-problem in scheduling. Then based on the organized pages, we proposed the branch-and-bound search algorithm to quickly search necessary terrain pages in flight scenes without redundant data. The algorithm regarded searching pages as searching optimal results in a solution space tree or graph, and it could be applicative to both query and prefetching sub-problems in scheduling. Experiment results showed that, compared with previous methods, our search algorithm could significantly improve searching efficiency but consume less memory space. Hence our method could offer better terrain page scheduling and smoother large-scale terrain visualization in flight simulations.