Executive Summary

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.