"Development Of Flight Simulator For ACSE Flight Simulator"

Supervised by Dr GA Manson

Abstract

The primary aim behind this project is to make the Real Time Flight Stimulator (RTFS) situated in the department of Automatic Control and System Engineering (ACSE) at the University Of Sheffield more accessible to students, staff and researchers across campus to share the resource efficiently and effectively via Networking. This resource is currently accessible by a few selected people, thus it is not a major support to the academics. This project would enable the students to access and apply their algorithm and program from the comfort of any computer on the University Campus, rather than the actual room where simulator is currently in operation. This accessibility would also need to be accompanied by a migration of this simulator to Java as this would enable more students to experiment on the simulator as Java is the main language of teaching in most of the departments in the University.

The primary task for this project is to develop Java classes to wrap existing classes which have been developed in C/C++ and Modula - 2 with Java to enable students to work with & extend the simulator in the language taught at University and hence eradicating the need to learn any other supporting languages. Secondly, the main focus of this project is to project is to provide functionality to enable remote access to the Simulator and hence eradicating the need for students to visit the simulator lab. Further more, this project will investigate into enabling multiple users to concurrently use the simulator and hence allow more efficient use of the simulator as compared to the current simulator allowing only a single user. This would enable academics to run lab classes for practical and marking purposes as the students can complete the various assignments or the function while in a lab using the simulator concurrently over the University Network or over the internet, depending on the connection speed of the remote computer. Various simulators have also been reviewed to decide features and functionality required by the simulator. These features would eventually be incorporated into this system to provide full functionality of the simulator from remote machines over a network.