A scalable architecture for the rapid prototyping of aircraft cockpits

This paper discusses the design of a scalable hardware and software architecture for the rapid prototyping of cockpit designs in flight simulation. This architecture uses 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. The design includes three software layers that provide the programmer with a simplified standard interface for integrating applications for flight simulation. The lowest layer controls the overall simulation environment that manages software objects, controls simulation start and stop functions, and routes messages by way of message queues to the upper layer applications. The second layer contains standard applications that are common to most cockpits. The majority of these applications are configured through configuration files for the applicable cockpit. The third layer consists of applications that cannot be configured through files. These applications are aircraft/cockpit-specific components that define the functions for each unique configuration