Software Architecture in Practice, Second Edition

Chapter 8. Flight Simulation: A Case Study in an Architecture for Integrability

The striking conclusion that one draws … is that the information processing capacity of [flight simulation computation] has been increasing approximately exponentially for nearly thirty years. There is at this time no clear indication that the trend is changing.

—Laurence Fogarty [Fogarty 67]

Modern flight simulators are among the most sophisticated software systems in existence. They are highly distributed, have rigorous timing requirements, and must be amenable to frequent updates to maintain high fidelity with the ever-changing vehicles and environment they are simulating. The creation and maintenance of these large systems presents a substantial software ...