Flight Simulation for Tomorrow's Aviation

Kurzfassung

Flight simulators have been operated within the aeronautics community for human factor studies and flight systems development for the last half century. They are virtual test beds, to evaluate concepts, conduct pilot-in-the-loop experiments and collect valuable user experience data. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Flight Systems is involved in developing and employing research flight simulators for more than 40 years. The first generation ground based simulator of DLR was built for the HFB 320 FLISI in 1970s. The ground based simulators for ATTAS and ACT/FHS EC135 were later introduced as the second generation. The development of these simulators started at 1980s and they have been used until 2010s. In 2009, DLR Institute of Flight Systems commissioned a next generation reconfigurable research flight simulator, called the Air Vehicle Simulator (AVES) in order to address the research requirements for tomorrow’s aviation. AVES has been operational since 2013 with its two cockpit infrastructures: an Airbus A320 and an Airbus Helicopters EC135. To date, various research projects have been carried out in AVES. Two of them that will be introduced in this talk as examples are Manual Operation of 4th Generation Airliners (MAN4GEN) and Enabling Technologies for Personal Air Transportation System (myCopter). While MAN4GEN aimed at identifying current deficiencies of situational awareness and manual control of modern flight decks with simulator experimentation, myCopter employed simulation experimentation for evaluating a steering wheel type control for personal air vehicles. As an important difference from commercial flight simulators, research flight simulators require high flexibility and adaptability in almost all aspects from flight systems and flight dynamics models to cockpit displays or control loading systems. This was the key requirement that derived the AVES system design towards providing interchangeable roll-on/roll-off (RoRo) cockpits of rotorcraft (EC135) and airplanes (A320) that can be operated on motion and fixed-base platforms according to research objectives. Further, flexibility and adaptability inspired the overall simulator software design. Accordingly, 2Simulate, the real-time distributed simulation infrastructure of AVES, is being empowered by recent simulation engineering research activities that target at enhanced composability and interoperability. After a gentle introduction of 2Simulate, this talk will present a collection of these recent efforts that enable model integration at various levels. The 2Simulate Modeling Language effort proposes an Application Programming Interface for C++ model development. With Simulink Coder™ 2Simulate Generic Real-time Target; code generation for MATLAB/Simulink models is tailored for AVES. Moreover, the MATLAB/Simulink 2Simulate Toolbox that is currently being developed intends to accommodate AVES users with model-in-the-loop testing capabilities. Through 2Simulate Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) Support, we are aiming at a FMI integration pipeline in AVES. Finally, 2Simulate High Level Architecture (HLA) Support endeavors providing capabilities for creating and joining HLA federations based on AviationSimNet Federation Object Model (FOM) in AVES.