ForwardSim is a very active sponsor and supporter of SimSmackdown. This annual event in which universities around the world conduct a collegial competition which concludes in a live demonstration of the newly developed large complex simulation for which each team developed one or more federates (individual elements of the larger simulation).
ForwardSim is a very active sponsor and supporter of SimSmackdown. This is an annual event in which universities around the world conduct a collegial competition which concludes in a live demonstration of the newly developed large complex simulation for which each team developed one or more federates (individual elements of the larger simulation). Since the student team members first come together in January to prepare for the event in May, and few (if any) of them have any prior experience with large scale distributed simulation, the opportunity is pretty challenging! Further complications result from the fact that this is the student’s first exposure to the complexities of simulation in an orbital environment. The problem can look pretty intimidating! Fortunately, ForwardSim offers toolkits for MatLab and Simulink which allow students with limited programing skills to very quickly master the intricacies of the IEEE 1516 standard High Level Architecture that SimSmackdown applies in their distributed simulation.
Impressively, it does this in a way that does not excessively abstract away the many options provided by this rich interface standard, but makes it very easy and to connect without errors Matlab and Simulink to the other simulations on the network. The HLA toolkit is well supported by help files to make its application clear. The power of the HLA toolkit allowed the students who used it to concentrate on the errors in their simulation and their interface design (of which there were plenty), and not get caught up in the persnickety details typical of HLA software. The left hand screen in the photograph shows a display from a visualization tool whose HLA interface was developed using ForwardSim’s HLA toolkit by members the University of Alabama in Huntsville team.
User: Bill Tucker, President of Simulationist US Inc (and student member of the 2013 UAH SimSmackdown team)