Laguna Beach: HLA on Baywatch?

Laguna Beach is a legacy stand-alone flight simulator, developed for demonstration purposes by Silicon Graphics, Inc. The Simulation group at TNO–FEL was able to successfully, and with only a modest amount of effort, convert this legacy application into an interoperable, HLA-compliant multi-aircraft federation. This rapid migration was achieved by using the RCI (Runtime Communication Infrastructure), developed by TNO–FEL in the SIMULTAAN project. The RCI is a code-generating middleware layer that abstracts simulation applications from the underlying interoperability standards (such as HLA or DIS). In the case of HLA, the RCI takes HLA object models as input, and from these the RCI code generator produces the necessary RTI communication and administrative framework. The first phase of the Laguna conversion process consisted of a FEDEP-based design cycle focused on analysing the code and data structures, identifying the required federates, and mapping the entities and state representations to HLA objects and interactions. The second phase consisted of using the RCI to generate the federation framework from the Laguna SOM created in the first phase. In the third phase the original application was then attached to this framework. TNO’s experiences with the Laguna Beach conversion show that a middleware-based approach to simulator migration is a highly successful one that can significantly decrease the time and effort necessary to achieve HLA-compliance for legacy simulators.