For a number of years, the MÄK RTI has supported a useful feature called FDD (or FED if we’re talking about HLA 1.3) file distribution. The original idea was that often during federation development you might find the need to update your FDD file. This often meant going around to every machine you were using and updating the local copy of the file. Obviously, this is both tedious and error prone. With FDD file distribution, only the federate that created the federation execution needed to have a local copy. When the federation was created, the file was distributed through the RTI to the rtiexec, which then distributed it to every other joining federate. This guaranteed that everyone was using the most up to date file and there were no discrepancies. There was one obvious downside to this feature however: start-up times were slower.

The weather in Atlantic city is definitely IFR conditions ("Instrument Flight Rules" - or for us recovering army helicopter pilots, "I Follow Roads"). There's zero visibility and clouds all the way down to the surface. I'm not the least bit worried though, I'm at the Air Traffic Controller's Technical Symposium with a large number people who are used to landing aircraft of any size in these conditions.

This week I am exhibiting at ATC Global 2012 in Amsterdam. There are 5000 attendees and 200 exhibitors here focused on Air Traffic Management - more specifically, the next generation Air Traffic Management systems being built in the US and Europe. 

So far, theres been lots of interest in our visualization and simulation interoperability solutions. I've seen several booths use Google Maps as an interim visualization tool because they didn't realize that there is a more flexible option - VR-TheWorld and VR-Vantage. 

When preparing fo the ATCA conferences this year, we wanted to show how MÄK tools can be used in the NextGen environment.  One example we showed used the VR-Exchange protocol translator to build a bridge connecting ADS-B traffic to simulation standard protocols, such as DIS and HLA Evolved (High Level Architecture).  By creating a custom Broker for VR-Exchange using the toolkit, it allowed us to bring in live air traffic to our synthetic environment in order to visualize the traffic as well as have our simulated entities respond to the live traffic.  This is just one example of how MÄK's open toolkits allow for the products to be extended  and customized  for creating mission focused solutions.