High-Level Architecture

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High-Level Architecture (HLA) is a general purpose architecture for distributed computer simulation systems.

Rather than have the entire simulation within a single executable, the simulation is split into different Federates, which interact with each other by a Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI), with federates typically running in their own threads/processes.

There are three big advantages to this over a monolithic simulation (e.g. FlightGear V3.6):

  1. It provides a robust environment to make the simulator multi-threaded, taking advantage of computers with multiple cores, or indeed running different parts of the simulation on different computers.
  2. It allows us to split out parts of the simulator such as the FDM and Renderer from each other and less time-critical sub-systems such as weather so that we can get consistent (and perhaps higher) frame-rates.
  3. It provides a very good framework to allow anyone to create components that interact with FlightGear, which may be running in their own threads, and reside in separate binaries[1], which will be also easier to debug/troubleshoot (think regression testing).

Stuart has started work on re-architecting parts of FlightGear to use HLA, though this is expected to be a multi-year project. Anyone interested in the current status of development should subscribe to the Flightgear -devel mailing list.

For additional information, please see:


External links