An Open-Source Simulation Environment for Model-Based Engineering

The proposed work is a new spacecraft simulation environment for model-based engineering of flight algorithms and software. The goal is to provide a much faster way to begin working with vehicle simulations, to make collaboration and integration with modern software development tools easier, to reduce cost and complexity with growing projects, to make "swapping" subsystems a trivial task (e.g., for trade studies), and to provide flexibility for integrating with C code (e.g., flight software), parallel computing (e.g., Monte-Carlo runs), and communication protocols (e.g., processor-in-the-loop testing). The work rests on the high-level Julia language, as it is both fast and excellent for algorithm design. The environment will be open-source in order to drive adoption and to enable it to become a common platform for providers of models, consulting services, and education.