Engineering The Information
for a Web-based Training System for the Use of Airborne Vehicles.
Programming Project Proposal.
Presented by
Jorge A. Martínez Malacara
Student of the Master in Information
Engineering
Matriculation
number 917654
Mecklenburger Str. 2
Zi. 221
49088 Osnabrück
March 15th, 2004.
Introduction.
Many times
large amounts of information need to be processed and analyzed in order to analyze
patters and compare them with expected patterns. A very good example of it could be the black
boxes used by airplanes.
Data
generated by multiple sources and sensors is recorded constantly and it can be
retrieved and analyzed thereafter. This analysis occurs generally after a
flight incident (or a crash). Its primary purpose is to provide with
information which could help to find the causes which lead to the situation in
which the airplane was involved.
The concept
of a black box can have many other applications, especially as an extension to
live monitoring of operations. The main advantage is that the information
generated by a device is stored for a certain amount of time, so it can be retrieved
and analyzed.
Commonly
one thinks of a black box as the source of data which can lead to know the
causes of an incident or an operation malfunction. However, these systems can
be very useful testing and simulating systems, or training and evaluating
personnel. The latter application
becomes of interest in this Programming Project, due to the needs of
engineering of information under certain operating conditions.
The
problem.
The black
box paradigm is all about storing data obtained over a certain period of time
from an array of sensors. After a certain period of time, the oldest data is
overwritten by new data. However, the information itself is never analyzed
until a malfunction in the monitored system occurs. A black box turns to be
only a very useful warehouse of clues, which is used mainly to determine the
causes of a problem.
As we
stated above, the information can be used personnel training, however, the task
requires very careful information engineering. The basic problem demands to
translate the information from the sensors (or the black box) into a format
which could be interpreted and read. We also need to transmit the data to a
data warehouse where we have the ability to analyze the information. The analysis task implies the pre-existence
of a knowledge base or a set of sample data which could be used as a reference
for comparison. The creation and/or use of that knowledge base make the task
even more challenging.
The
architecture of such a system would look as follows.
As we can
see, there are 3 phases in the information flow. The first stage is generated
online, with the sensors feeding the black box. The second process is batch or
online, depending on whether there is a permanent communications link between
the black box and the events database. The third stage is the evaluation
process itself, when the information contained in the events database is compared
with the expected/allowed performances. It could be possible to update the
performances database afterwards, given that the nature of the monitored system
allows it.
Let’s
define log as the set of data generated by the black box and transmitted to the
events database.
Today’s
technologies allow concentrating the analysis task in one place, but it is
required to transmit the log, which can turn into an information engineering
problem.
The Information
Engineering Problem
There are
several challenges from the point of view of Information Engineering. On one
hand, we can find ourselves creating huge logs of information, which require be
compressing and transmitting over the internet. On the other hand, the logs
require detailed information but at the same time they have to be as small as
possible. The information then has to be analyzed and interpreted by a program,
which has to compare such information to the parameters given by the
performances database.
The proposed system
It is not
an easy task to find a system with sensors which can be analyzed in such a way
that in 6 weeks a working log analysis system could be implemented. In order to
focus in the information engineering tasks, an implemented system had to be
found. A very good alternative is the Microsoft’s Flight Simulator (MSFS). This software simulates a real airplane’s
operation to a very high level of detail. In addition to this, there are
hundreds of programs available which increase the functionality of the program
and enable to capture data from the game.
Therefore,
a black box system can be implemented within a short period of time, given that
there enough documentation available for such a task. Such a system should be
programmed using C/C++ or Visual C++. Other programming languages can also be
used, but due to the lack of time, a powerful programming language had to be
chosen.
On the
other hand, there has to be a program or a script which allows decoding the log
generated by the black box system and compares it with given parameters from
the performance’s database. I chose PHP
to achieve this goal.
After a
small research trying to find the ways to read the information from the Flight
Simulator, 2 programs turned out to be useful. The first one is called “netpipes” and it is provided by Microsoft. The program
contains header files in C++ language which can be used to read the information
from within the Flight Simulator in the form of offsets. However, a serious
limitation was also discovered. Microsoft has changed the internal offsets of
the Flight Simulator which can be read from the program. Therefore, there exists
a version of netpipes for each of the versions of the
Flight Simulator since FS98. In addition to this, it was discovered that a
significant amount of Flight Simulator’s users have old versions of the program
(FS98, FS2000, FS2002). This would imply almost a different black box program
for each one version of the MSFS.
There is
another utility, currently very popular among developers for the MSFS. It is an
internal Dynamic Link Library (dll) created by Pete Dowson, called FSUIPC (Flight Simulator Universal Inter
Process Communication). This DLL maps the offsets from each one of the last 4
versions of Flight Simulator into a single offset table, which can be read by
external programs. There exists documentation available for several programming
languages on how to implement applications using this library; therefore it was
selected as the best solution to the information gathering problem.
The system
will therefore look like the following diagram:
This is the
proposal I have for the programming project. Given its acceptance, it will be
developed within the timeframe of 6 weeks. There will be weekly reports where
all the incidences during the developing process will be detailed. In addition
to this, and given that there is enough time, there will be a series of alpha
tests of the black box program made by Flight Simulator users. Their logs will
be kept as a testing source for the PHP scripts.