Applied Dynamics - Real-Time Simulation and Simulation-Based Aircraft Testing

Applied Dynamics International (ADI) supplies tools and services for the development of electronic systems found in modern aircraft, spacecraft, satellites, military ground vehicles, weapon systems, unmanned aerial vehicles and more.

ADI is involved in the development of aerospace and defense products with a focus on intelligent integration through the use of real-time simulation and simulation-based software test.

When an aircraft development program includes tight schedules and the integration of substantial new technology content, ADI's highly interoperable and open-architecture ADvantage framework provides a reliable foundation for system integration.

REAL-TIME SIMULATION OF AIRCRAFT SUBSYSTEM INTEGRATION

The aircraft integration lab provides a flight simulator for engineering teams to develop, integrate, and test aircraft subsystems. Subsystems such as flight controls, avionics, and cockpit displays are connected to the simulator and taken for a virtual flight test.

Real-time simulation is used to provide those components of aircraft flight that are difficult or costly to bring into a lab such as aerodynamics, six degrees-of-freedom motion, changing global position and 70,000lb-thrust engines.

SIMULATED FLIGHT-TEST FOR DISCOVERY OF DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION FLAWS

The discovery of design and implementation flaws during simulated flight test is much more cost effective and imposes far less risk on the development program than flaws found during final flight test.

Aircraft development programs of yesteryear would task engineers to develop costly 'home-grown' real-time simulation systems. Today, advanced aerospace and defense programs rely on ADI's ADvantage framework to provide a real-time simulation backbone.

INTELLIGENT INTEGRATION FOR AIRCRAFT DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS

'Intelligent Integration' is the latest approach used to perform highly efficient system integration for aircraft development programs. When performing Intelligent Integration, a pure-software 'virtual integration lab' is implemented in parallel with real-time simulator implementation.

This approach allows for greater parallelization of development activities and thus reduces the overall cost and schedule for aircraft integration.

The ADvantage framework is the only simulation framework designed specifically for Intelligent Integration. ADvantage provides seamless movement between low-cost desktop simulation and high-performance real-time simulation to optimize system integration efficiency.

OPEN ARCHITECTURE REAL-TIME SIMULATION

Aircraft integration labs must interface with a combination of cutting edge and proprietary technologies. This raises the concern of whether an off-the-shelf real-time simulation framework will keep pace with the latest technologies and whether it will enable proprietary technologies to be easily interfaced.

The ADvantage framework provides the best of both worlds by offering a large-user-base, easy-to-use, reliable, and lower-cost simulation framework combined with complete compatibility and interoperability achieved by using a fully open architecture. This open architecture enables integration teams to customize and extend the framework functionality through the use of numerous real-time and non-real-time open interfaces.

THE ADvantage FRAMEWORK

The ADvantage framework is a comprehensive software package for building and executing real-time simulation and desktop cosimulation projects. The ADvantage framework is C/C++-based and includes interfaces for mixed language development using FORTRAN and Ada simulation and code and supports popular simulation modeling tools such as Simulink and SystemBuild.

As simulation technology continues to evolve with new standard aerospace interfaces, such as ARINC-664, the ADvantage framework continues to evolve with support for the latest technologies.

ADI SERVICES

At ADI we're proud of the contribution we made placing highly-trained experts to help get the job done on some of the most challenging aircraft integration projects. ADI offers services specializing in many areas of aircraft technology integration and real-time simulation. Areas of expertise include:

• Turnkey simulator / test system design
• Sensor emulator, electronic circuit, and board design
• Microcode and low-level, and register-level programming
• Real-time operating system interfacing and development
• User / tester interface programming
• Simulation model development
• Test script and enterprise automation development
• Database / revision control system interfacing
• Automatic test report generation