An engineering design simulator for advanced distributed simulation

The US Air Force's Crew-Centered Cockpit Design (CCCD) Programs is developing a formal, structured process to improve the design, analysis, and testing of cockpits. Veda Incorporated is working with the CCCD Program Office to provide an enhanced and validated Crew-Centered System Design Process (CSDP) and a Cockpit Design System (CDS) Toolset to meet this need. A key component of the toolset is a reconfigurable engineering design simulator that can be used to model cockpit display concepts quickly and easily. This simulator uses Advanced Distributed Simulation (ADS) technology to evaluate systems under consideration. This paper provides a detailed description of the engineering design simulator. It provides multiple-player (friend and foe) interactions with a simulated real-world environment. Players may be moving airborne or ground-based vehicles such as aircraft, tanks or armored personnel carriers; or may be static, such as surface-to-air-missile (SAM) site or anti-aircraft battery. The development and rapid prototyping of new cockpit configurations, as well as the simulation of existing cockpit configurations and aircraft are all possible with the engineering design simulator. This simulator ensures that the crew-centered development and validation of new cockpit configurations can be performed under realistic, adverse, and/or high workload conditions. This paper also describes a distributed, scaleable hardware and software architecture that is being used to support the simulator. The architecture features the Unix operating system and a homogeneous computing environment of Silicon Graphics workstations that rely heavily on replicated shared memory (also known as reflective memory) and Ethernet networks.