The European Space Agency (ESA) has increasingly become aware
of the need to provide customer support for the evaluation of
needs in the development of computer simulation. Within such contexts
customers require their problem scenario to be rapidly prototyped
to provide skeletal but functional computer simulation. This simulation
would then be used as a basis for providing an assessment of potential
problems, an estimate of resource requirements and a verification
the initial specification itself. This appraisal would then be
used to assess the suitability of the proposed solution and to
forecast the resources necessary to complete the project within
the customer's requirements. Thus the prototype can form the basis
for the User Requirement Document (URD) for the remainder of the
project.
Within this scenario a requirement for prototyping and simulation
software has been identified by ESTEC. This contract would provide
ESTEC with a detailed survey of the currently available prototyping
and simulation tools that could address this requirement. The
survey process would include a review of the environment (platform),
its usability and its functionality (both within the package and
its integration with the environment). At the end of the survey
process a selected product(s) would be acquired for multiple platforms
(IBM PC compatible and Sun workstation platforms are currently
proposed) and evaluated upon a realistic simulation task.