Modeling and Information Processing

HLA distributed simulation
Presentation

Chronogram of the exchanges of a distributed simulation for the formation flight of orbital systems

 Context

The department is mainly working on supporting simulations under the HLA standard. This standard covers the development of federations by the assembly of federates observing a protocol of subscription/publication described in the standard. Support (RTI) for this standard has been the subject of some industrial development and a development internal to DTIM. A number of problems nevertheless remain answered, amongst which:

• The recovery, and so the bringing into compliance with the HLA standard, of existing simulators so as to be able to use them in new federations
• Associated with the previous point, the development of hybrid simulations with both humans and hardware in the loop
• The control of real time performance within an HLA federation; from this point of view the mechanisms supported by the standard are unsatisfactory since they transfer this problem to the federates
• Installation on particular operating systems.

Orientation of the work

In the matter of distributed simulation, the objectives of the work relating to the support of the HLA standard are:

• Complete support for the standard 1.3 and its evolution to the level of the IEEE 1516 standard; this objective is consistent with the development policy for Onera's distributed simulations, particularly the work developed at the System Design and Performance Evaluation department on the subject (GENESIS tools, HLA certification). It means continuing with the publication of CERTI as open source software.
• The study of the adequacy of the HLA standard for the setting up of hybrid simulations, with hardware in the loop, complying with strong real time constraints. This problem requires, on one hand, the encapsulation of the existing simulators in the HLA federates, and, on the other, the construction and validation of the performance models of the federations created, this with the objective of designing the architecture of the simulators correctly.
• The real time constraints introduced by the preceding simulations do suggest to us the special services that we would like to see offered by the supporting OSs.

Home page of the CERTI Internet site More long term objectives

Long term objectives

• Continuing development, bringing CERTI into compliance with the IEEE 1516 standard, and building a common Onera offer on HLA in cooperation with the Long-term Design and Systems Integration Department which is developing the federation generation and management tools (Genesis).
• Studying the mechanisms for real time, relevant to operational systems, in support of the CERTI development activities for real time use.
• Studying the mechanisms for the encapsulation of existing simulators, possibly event-driven, not developed according to the HLA standard. This would meet a real need to recover existing simulators in order to integrate them into federations of greater scope.
• Studying the links to be established between the HLA type event-driven simulations and the numerical simulations of physical phenomena so that HLA may be the specification of a bus for simulation onto which various types of simulators, event-driven or continuous, may be grafted.

Last Update: 25 February 2008 - © ONERA 2009 - Terms of use