Running High Level Architecture in Real-Time for Flight Simulator Integration

DLR’s Air Vehicle Simulator (AVES) is designed such that interchangeable cockpits of an EC135 rotorcraft and an A320 airplane can be operated either on a motion or on a fixed-base platform. While the EC135 and the A320 simulators are usually deployed standalone, there are emerging requirements to conduct simulator experiments that both simulators are involved in. Further demands include adding a traffic server for computer generated aircraft and a tower simulator to the simulation facility. To tackle the challenge of developing a complex distributed network simulation, the High Level Architecture (HLA) and Aviation-SimNet are selected as the underlying standards. As the AVES is a flight simulation facility with hard real-time constraints, the chosen HLA implementation, which is CERTI from ONERA, has to fulfill the deterministic processing and data exchange requirements. CERTI had to be ported to the AVES’s real-time operating system QNX, and integrated into the core software infrastructure, the AVES Software Development Kit. To prove the usability of the real-time implementation, the worst case transfer times are measured for typical scenarios in order to validate the solution. Finally, a full scale implementation is carried out in AVES.