Next Generation Toolsets for Weapons Separation Evaluations

Store certification is an important step to integrate new weapons and aircraft into the Navy and Marine Corps. The store certification process ensures that stores can be safely separated from aircraft in flight and develops a flight envelope of the conditions required for safe separation. Certifying stores requires proper model development and simulation which is then validated through flight testing. Flight testing is the most expensive part of the certification process and is ideally just a validation of simulated store separation events. If the flight test reveals new information or shows that the store is unable to separate safely, the store may need to be redesigned which will add time and expense to the process. Thus an effective software tool that can accurately simulate store separation events is a critical component needed to quickly and affordably certify stores.        We propose the creation of a software system that uses 6DOF equations-of-motion and data from test and simulation events to quickly simulate, visualize, and assess the safety of store trajectories during separation for fixed wing and possibly rotary wing aircraft. Our approach will focus on creating a high performance, user friendly, cross platform solution that will focus on a matrix and quaternion approach that is able to utilize multithreading and GPU acceleration to provide significant speed increases over traditional approaches. Our approach will include relevant interpolation schemes as well which may include Hermite interpolation, cubic splines, or a moving-average method that can adapt between interpolation and regression depending on the form of the weighting function.  We also propose spending significant time defining the requirements of the system and creating a system design with SysML diagrams. This approach will allow for faster development and a system that is modular, well documented, maintainable, and extensible.