Cockpit display prototyping for an engineering design simulator

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The crew-centered cockpit design (CCCD) program is developing a formal, structured process to improve the design, analysis, and testing of cockpits. Veda Incorporated is working with the CCCD Program Office to provide an enhanced and validated crew-centered system design process (CSDP) and a cockpit design system (CDS) toolset to meet this need. A key component of the toolset is a reconfigurable engineering design simulator that can be used to model cockpit display concepts quickly and easily. This simulator uses an avionics instrument development system to prototype displays that require high-resolution, high-performance, real-time graphics. This paper provides details of the development of a cockpit display application from design through integration. Using an object-oriented approach and graphical user interface, a crew system designer can rapidly model display concepts. The resulting display software can be distributed to other users, and can then be executed (with or without modifications) on a Silicon Graphics system without the need for a run-time license. This paper also describes a distributed, scalable hardware and software architecture that is being used to support the simulator. The architecture features the Unix operating system and a homogeneous computing environment of Silicon Graphics workstations that rely heavily on replicated shared memory (also known as reflective memory) and Ethernet networks.