The design, development, and deployment of a containerized real-time simulation executive architecture for scheduling and executing high fidelity software system models poses many challenges. Both industry and the Department of Defense (DoD) are researching technologies and software platforms to provide efficiency and effectivity benefits through DevSecOps and containerization. While DevSecOps has propagated toward the modeling and simulation industry, there are still significant obstacles to be addressed to support a systematic paradigm shift from the status quo.
Real-time simulation domains are rarely plug and play environments, especially for full-flight simulators. There are external aspects to include haptic, visual, kinetic, aural, and temporal characteristics. There are hard real-time considerations for preemptive task switching and sequencing, prioritization, jitter, and latency. There are typically services necessary for shared memory, semaphores, inter-process communications, and peripheral interfaces to include Ethernet, MIL-STD-1553, ARINC 429, Serial, standard I/O, and distributed training environments.
This paper evaluates these considerations within the applied domain of a real-time full-flight simulation executive architecture running high fidelity software system models within a containerized architecture. The simulation executive architecture runs on a Linux operating system with a real-time kernel patch. The real-time executive runs a collections of software modules scheduled and executed in a deterministic real-time fashion for the software-in-the-loop simulation. This executive architecture has been utilized for multiple DoD USAF flight simulators including Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) 14 CFR Part 60 Level D compliant systems requiring Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) compliance.
First, a review of industry and DoD activity as related to this concept model is decomposed. Second, the problem domain and challenges to its application are defined. Finally, a detailed open framework for implementing a containerized real-time simulation executive architecture and subsystems is provided. This is critical to enable system designers to achieve a successful deployment for a real flight simulation application.
Keywords
FLIGHT SIMULATION,OPEN ARCHITECTURE,OPEN STANDARDS,OPERATIONAL ENVIRONMENT,REAL-TIME
Additional Keywords