An object-oriented architecture for dynamic environmental effects in real-time, high level architecture simulations

摘要

The IEEE standard 1278.1 for Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) says little about the representation of the environment, which means that a static representation is generally assumed - to a large extent this DIS legacy has been carried over into the new High Level Architecture (HLA) for simulation. In this paper we outline a scalable, extensible, object-oriented software architecture for dynamic environmental effects - such as cratering, damaged buildings, smoke, weather and sea state - in real-time, HLA simulations, Our architecture exploits spatial locality by ensuring that federates only cache that part of the environment that is of interest - this uses the HLA Data Distribution Management services. It also includes mechanisms to ensure that the cached environmental data remains consistent. Our software architecture makes use of a number of well-known object-oriented design patterns, such as the Command and Observer patterns, and is described using the Object Modelling Technique notation. An object-oriented database management system is also used to provide storage for large environmental databases and to allow environmental data to persist beyond the end of a simulation. We describe a prototype implementation of our software architecture based on the Synthetic Theatre of War Run Time Infrastructure (RTI) and the Defense Modelling and Simulation Office 1.0 RTI, which includes an OpenGL stealth tool.