Prototyping interactive cockpit applications

In the early phases of a cockpit application development process prototypes are built for initial evaluation and demonstration purposes. It is in this phase that innovative ideas are made more concrete, and a base for the specification is created. The prototypes are improved by performing several design-review cycles. The iterative nature of prototyping demands a flexible and customizable design and evaluation environment. Using the experience obtained in a variety of research projects during the last decade, NLR has developed a prototyping environment that facilitates the rapid development and evaluation of avionics display formats. It supports a component based design strategy, enabling efficient re-use of previous work and facilitating parallel activities of several project team members. The resulting display formats can be rapidly deployed to the appropriate evaluation platform, ranging from desktop test environments, via cockpit mock-ups, up to high-fidelity flight simulator and even flight test aircraft. The tools have been successfully applied in several cockpit application development projects. They have allowed to drastically reduce the effort and duration involved with implementing the prototypes, so that customer research issues can be addressed earlier and in a more cost-efficient way. Furthermore, the tools enable evaluated prototypes to be used as a base for further development towards a certified cockpit application running on an avionics target system.