Simulation environments are often complex systems made up of diverse, heterogeneous components. These environments require communication infrastructure for sharing data between subsystems, and typically there is a high demand for real-time data exchange, with low latency and high reliability.
RTI middleware solves the requirement for high-performance, low-latency messaging infrastructure even in the most complex, diverse simulation environments. RTI's proven commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) middleware solutions are in use in a number of large-scale commercial simulators today. Unlike other commercial messaging implementations, RTI's solutions were designed specifically to ease the development of heterogeneous distributed systems with real-time data distribution requirements.
Additionally, RTI's DDS and JMS publish-subscribe paradigms allow simulation subsystems to share data without requiring unique interfaces for each new system - the new system merely needs to "subscribe" to the desired dataset. This frees the application developer from needing to know about the internals of the other subsystems required to share data, making the addition of new systems a breeze.
The US Army and University of Iowa cooperated to create several high-fidelity simulators to demonstrate how US Army vehicles and components can be tested and evaluated using virtual proving ground (VPG) technology. They needed a middleware solution that was truly effective at real-time, low-latency data interchange to manage the large number of simulation components working in conjunction.
Force Technology, market leader in the design of multi-ship simulator systems, created the world's first system to provide a complete environment for training tugboat captains in maneuvering large vessels such as oil and gas tankers into restricted spaces using multiple tugs. They required middleware that would offer real-time data interchange between subsystems without requiring the developers to know about the internals of each subsystem added to the application.
CAE's Sim XXI full-flight simulator is regarded by pilots around the world as the closest simulation of the true experience of flight. It delivers breakthrough visual realism, precise cockpit replication, high-fidelity avionics simulation, and flight and ground-handling characteristics indistinguishable from the aircraft. Achieving this level of full-flight simulation involves a variety of complex subsystems sharing and processing data in real-time.
The Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) Dahlgren Division needed to investigate how to apply advanced technologies and concepts to the Naval Surface Ship Anti-Air Warfare (AAW) problem domain. They tasked the US Navy High Performance Distributed Computing Project (HiPer-D) with creating test bed demonstrations, based fully on COTS technology, that would allow NAVSEA to investigate technologies supporting real-time, distributed, scalable, fault-tolerant, heterogeneous computing systems to be used in combat systems.
"As we evaluated different networking middleware options, including CORBA, DCOM and HLA, it became clear that DDS was not only the easiest to use, but also the most effective at controlling update rates, message ordering, and message latencies."
Dr. Yiannis Papelis
Chief Technical Officer
National Advanced Driving Simulators & Simulation Center
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