The typical aircraft integration lab provides a flight simulator used by engineering teams to develop, integrate, and test aircraft subsystems. Subsystems such as flight controls, avionics, and cockpit displays are brought to the integration lab, connected to the simulator and taken for a virtual flight test.

Real-time simulation is used to integrate those components of aircraft flight that are difficult or costly to bring into a lab such as aerodynamics, six degrees-of-freedom motion, changing global position, and 70,000 lbs-thrust engines. The discovery of design and implementation flaws during simulated flight test is much more cost effective and imposes far less risk on the development program than flaws found during final flight test.   <next>

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Aircraft development programs of yesteryear would task a group of software and electrical engineers to develop “home-grown” real-time simulation systems from the ground up. Home-grown real-time simulator development added significant cost and risk to the development program. Today, advanced aerospace and defense programs rely on ADI’s ADvantage framework to provide a real-time simulation backbone offering:

• More than a decade of success on the most advanced development programs
• Development costs spread over a large user base
• Field proven scalability and reliability
• All software features required by the most demanding development program

As simulation technology continues to evolve with new versions of popular simulation languages,
such as Simulink and SystemBuild, and as new standard aerospace interfaces, such as ARINC-664, are adopted, the ADvantage framework continues to evolve with support for the latest technologies. Read more in PDF (2MB).