Migration of an engineering design simulator to the high level architecture

The US Air Force's Crew-Centered Design Technology (CCDT) Program* is developing a formal, structured process to improve the design, analysis, and testing of cockpits. Veda Incorporated is working with the CCDT 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(s) or antiaircraft 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 the process of adapting the DIS-compliant environment to the High Level Architecture (HLA). Advantages and disadvantages will be discussed in the conclusion on the use of a distributed, scaleable hardware and software architecture being used to support the simulator.