REAL-TIME DESIGN PATTERNS IN VIRTUAL SIMULATIONS

D. Hodson, R. Baldwin, D. Gehl, J. Weber, and S. Narayanan

Keywords

Virtual, simulation, real-time, hierarchical modelling, components, rate monotonic

Abstract

In a virtual simulation, people and real system hardware interact with the simulated system. Introducing these real-world elements into the simulation environment imposes timing constraints which, from a software standpoint, places the design into the class of real-time systems. We develop two software design patterns for real-time virtual simulations: a variant of the model-view-controller architecture and a companion component pattern that facilitates the development of hierarchical simulation models, graphical displays, and network input/output (I/O) that meet real-time constraints. These design patterns promote good programming practice and allow the performance of a design to be evaluated using rate monotonic analysis techniques. We also introduce selective abstraction and focused fidelity to reduce simulation development time and cost, while simultaneously improving runtime performance and the validity of simulation results.

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