A practical objected-oriented approach for distributed real-time simulation

Under sponsorship of the Embedded Computer Resources Support Improvement Program (ESIP), the Avionics Logistics Branch of the Wright Laboratory (WL/AAAF) undertook research to reduce the cost and improve the performance of systems used for support and test of embedded avionics software. These systems are characterized by real-time simulation of avionics stimulus signals coupled with real-time data acquisition and monitoring. The goal was to produce a generic architecture which was completely modular, reconfigurable, expandable, and reusable so that the Air Force could save the expense of designing completely new systems from scratch for each new avionics support application. The resulting architecture is an excellent example of object-oriented design in Ada for real-time avionics and flight simulation. This system incorporates concurrent multi-processing distributed over a number of processors. Other recent attempts at object-oriented design of real-time systems have encountered significant performance difficulties due to inefficiencies in communications and scheduling implementation. Research by WL/AAAF has focused on careful design of these mechanisms. The resulting system achieves outstanding real-time performance through very efficient process scheduling and inter-process communications while retaining a formal object-oriented approach