INTEGRATED HELICOPTER DESIGN TOOLS

Rotorcraft design and development is a complex, time-consuming process requiring coordination between many engineering and manufacturing disciplines. The sooner that a multidisciplinary design team is able to converge on the final design through iteration, the better. In spite of the relative sophistication of today’s state-of-the-art computerized engineering tools, there has been a lack of provision for concurrent design, whereby inputs from a broad spectrum of engineering and manufacturing disciplines are included early in the design cycle. Integrated Helicopter Design Tools (IHDT) addresses this problem by exploiting state-of-the-art Object Oriented (O-O) technologies to provide the design community with a design infrastructure based on the Triservice Advanced Countermeasures and Threats Integrated Combat Simulation (TACTICS) host architecture and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) 2.0 standard. IHDT integrates existing, or legacy, engineering applications into a design environment that supports client/server processes distributed across multiple dissimilar computer platforms in a plug-and-play fashion. Use of IHDT will enable a greater number of disciplines to become involved earlier in the design process, resulting in significant reductions in development costs, cycle times, and ultimately, unit cost.