Simple and efficient integration of aeronautical support tools for human-in-the-loop evaluations

Automation of aeronautical procedures and automated support tools for controllers and pilots have to be evaluated carefully with human operators in the loop. However, the integration of different vendor's operational aeronautical software applications with experimental support tools in simulated air-space environments is demanding and costly. Existing tools are usually not designed to be integrated with each other, thus an efficient and vendor-neutral way to integrate existing tools in a simple and efficient way is needed. This paper discusses a simple, efficient, and proven approach for the integration of a wide range of aeronautical software applications (commercial and academic, operational and experimental) in a unified human-in-the-loop evaluation environment. This approach integrates existing simulation and support tools using a simple software adapter to distribute shared simulation state in an internet-protocol-based multicast cloud using XML as presentation layer.