aircraft_simulation_core

Aircraft Simulation Core

This is the copyright work of The MITRE Corporation, and was produced for the U. S. Government under Contract Number 693KA8-22-C-00001, and is subject to Federal Aviation Administration Acquisition Management System Clause 3.5-13, Rights In Data-General (Oct. 2014), Alt. III and Alt. IV (Jan. 2009). No other use other than that granted to the U. S. Government, or to those acting on behalf of the U. S. Government, under that Clause is authorized without the express written permission of The MITRE Corporation. For further information, please contact The MITRE Corporation, Contracts Management Office, 7515 Colshire Drive, McLean, VA 22102-7539, (703) 983-6000.

(c) 2026 The MITRE Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Approved for Public Release; Distribution Unlimited. 15-1482

Aircraft Simulation Core is a C++ library for point-mass aircraft simulation primitives and algorithms. It is intended to be consumed by higher-level applications and scenario frameworks rather than run directly as an application.

Public Surface

The library target is mitre::oss::simcore.

Public headers live under include/public. They include:

• Core state and command types such as AircraftState, DynamicsState, Guidance, AircraftControl, ControlCommands, and Waypoint.
• Dynamics, trajectory, and path implementations such as ThreeDOFDynamics, KinematicTrajectoryPredictor, EuclideanTrajectoryPredictor, HorizontalPath, and VerticalPath.
• Earth, geometry, weather, and wind utilities such as EllipsoidalEarthModel, LocalTangentPlane, GeolibUtils, WindStack, and WeatherEstimate.
• Extension points and null implementations for consumers that provide their own aircraft performance, controllers, weather operators, scenario entities, and data writers.

Build And Test

Configure and build the public test executable:

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --target simcore_public_tests --parallel

Run the public test suite:

ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure --parallel 2

Build only the library target when tests are not needed:

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DSIMCORE_BUILD_TESTING=OFF
cmake --build build --target simcore --parallel

Consuming From CMake

Consumers can add the project with CPM and link to the exported alias:

CPMAddPackage(
   NAME aircraft_simulation_core
   GITHUB_REPOSITORY mitre/aircraft_simulation_core
   GIT_TAG <tag-or-commit>
   OPTIONS
      "SIMCORE_BUILD_TESTING OFF"
)

target_link_libraries(my_target PRIVATE mitre::oss::simcore)

simcore pulls in its direct library dependencies: cppuom, log4cplus, geolib, minicsv, and nlohmann_json.

Scenario/run-file loading is intentionally outside this library.

Simulation Flow

flowchart TD
   Intent["AircraftIntent / Waypoints"] --> Guidance["Guidance"]
   Control["AircraftControl / ControlCommands"] --> Dynamics["ThreeDOFDynamics"]
   Guidance --> Dynamics
   Weather["WeatherTruth / Wind"] --> Dynamics
   Dynamics --> State["AircraftState / DynamicsState"]
   State --> Writers["OutputHandler / FlightDeckDataWriter"]

---

Happy Simulating!

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