HLA Certi, getting started !

HLA stands for High Level Architecture, a set of specifications for distributed simulation systems that originated from the US Department of Defense (DoD) around 1996. (Needs citation)

HLA Overview

Concepts

ToDO

Features

Certi

Certi is an open-source implementation of HLA specifications. It provides a HLA Runtime Infrastruture (RTI), a Federation Ambassador module and APIs to build a HLA federation.

Compiling CERTI

Predependencies

You will need to install Cmake and have GCC installed on your Linux system. I found it mandatory to install YACC and LEX as well. libxml2-dev is optional, you want to install it to be able to export/import federations.

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake sudo byacc flex libxml2-dev
Build Certi from sources

The first thing to do to work with Certi is to get the sources from Certi’s git forge. Then create a build folder.

git clone git://git.savannah.nongnu.org/certi.git
cd certi
mkdir build
cd build

Run Cmake by picking an installation folder installFolder and compile with make. In make -jn, replace n with the number of cores to speed up compilation.

cmake -DCMAKE_ISNTALL_PREFIX=/installFolder ..
make -j4
make install

When using recent versions of GCC, compilation might fail with the following error message:

[ 66%] Linking CXX executable TestFedTime
libFedTimed.so.1.0.0: undefined reference to `typeinfo for RTI::Exception`

This is due to a cyclical dependency (FedTime is supposed to throw RTI::Exception) not declared in CMake (to make it work). However, throwing exceptions requires a typeinfo lookup which triggers GCC’s error. Making RTI::Exception destructor purely virtual seems to fix the problem. (Probably because in the absence of non-inline virtual methods, GCC copies the typeinfo to all relevant translation units, see here.

Last step is to run a script to setup the approriate environment variables.

source installFolder/myCERTI_env.sh

I recommand to add this line at the end of your ~/.bashrc file so that you don’t have to rerun it everytime.

Getting started with HLA Certi

Now we want to run the CERTI tutorial. First, clone the applications repository

git clone git://git.savannah.nongnu.org/certi/applications.git Certi-Apps

It’s now time to build the tutorial:

cd Certi-Apps/HLA_Tutorial
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_ISNTALL_PREFIX=appsInstallFolder ..
make
make install

Now open three terminals and run respectively:

  1. cd into appsInstallFolder/share/federations. Launch the Runtime rtig
  2. Launch the tutorial controller app appsInstallFolder/bin/controllerFederate
  3. Launch the tutorial process app appsInstallFolder/bin/processFederate

Then terminal 2 should guide you through the the tutorial, make sure you observe the three terminals outputs during the execution of the tutorial.

Sources: