Architecture development of research flight simulator based on COTS

The use of simulation for research and engineering enables to evaluate new aircraft designs, equipment or concepts in an realistic environment. But the required time, cost and complexity to create or reuse simulations often limits their application. This paper describes the design of the hardware and software architecture for the COTS base reconfigurable flight simulator in an affordable manner. More powerful, supporting object-oriented method and easy-to-use mature commercial software was adopted and Data Distribution Service for Realtime Systems (DDS) middleware was chosen to improve the communication and simplify the programming. Mediator and Facade design pattern were used extensively to obtain reusability, simplicity and testability of simulation software framework. Result shows these methods could produce a cheap, extensible and reliable flight simulator for research.