Introduction

This page lists several ideas for desired improvements to DAVE-ML that are needed to make it a more viable means for distributing and exchanging flight dynamics models. This page is provided for convenience of the DAVE-ML community, but doesn’t represent any commitment by NASA or AIAA or anyone else to achieve these goals. Help (volunteer effort, funding, advocacy) would be helpful, as always.

DAVE-ML Development Roadmap (notional)

DAVE-ML 2.1

Additional fileHeader subelements

  • Add an optional classification subelement; contents will be defined by the particular user community.

  • Add an optional dataAssumptions subelement; this text field should specifically mention limitations of the encoded model for quick reference and documentation.

  • Add an optional tag subelement; this would be a string to be defined by the model creator. This string would serve to identify several DAVE-ML files as being part of the same version of an aircraft model, sort of like a tag in a versioning system.

  • Add an optional type subelement, if we can agree on a limited set of UTI strings to choose from. This is a response to an earlier sim-stds mailing list posting by Dennis Linse in which he expressed a desire to be able to distinguish types of DAVE-ML files, by aircraft type.

DAVE-ML 2.2

Multidimensional output tables

Add support for storing multiple function values in a table, both gridded and ungridded, such that only one independent-variable search/normalization is required to find several output values. This would be useful to save both DAVE-ML file length and run-time performance, and addresses the suggestion made by Dan Newman in a sim-stds mailing list posting in May 2010 concerning ungridded tables.

Vector/matrix support

Add the ability to define inputs and outputs as vectors and matrices. MathML already supports vector and matrix types; only need to figure out how to deal with these. Geoff Brian has a draft AIAA paper that discusses more specifics; it will be presented at the 2011 AIAA Modeling and Simulation conference in Portland.

DAVE-ML 2.3

Subsystems

Add sufficient information to the DAVEfunc top-level element to be able to re-use such a model by a yet-to-be-defined higher-level element. Sort of like a library block; this may lend itself to a standard library of common aerospace components (actuators come to mind).

DAVE-ML 3.0

Dynamic model wrapper

This will probably be a new top-level element, such as DAVEdyn, that wraps around a static DAVEfunc to add state variables, either discrete or continuous, and will contain sufficient meta-data that a processing system will know how to implement it. This will also require dynamic check cases that are considerably larger than the staticShots currently supported.

DAVE-ML 4.0

System-of-systems

This release will introduce yet another top-level element, such as DAVEmodel, that can embed multiple dynamic sub-models (DAVEdyns) or static sub-models (DAVEfuncs) or even other DAVEmodels to create a true system-of-systems hierarchy.

Other DAVE-ML related projects…

Want to help? Help define any of the above roadmap elements, or take a crack at one of these opportunities. Discussions should be posted to [email protected]

Native DAVE-ML editor

The DAVE-ML community needs a multi-platform DAVE-ML native editing application. This is a major project! It probably could be based on the open-source Eclipse integrated development environment which is extensible. It would be nice if the XML source were completely hidden from the user, and interactive 3-D graphics were available to view data tables.

User’s manual

A reference manual for DAVE-ML is prepared for each version of the DTD, but is pretty dry reading. We would all benefit from a booklet that describes typical development and use of a DAVE-ML model, in terms a journeyman simulation, aerodynamics or modeling engineer would understand, including how to get set up to use one or both APIs (Janus or DaveMLTranslator).