The RTI abstraction component for MS.NET (RACoN) is an open-source library (available with LGPL v3 license) that deals with the HLA runtime infrastructure (RTI) level communication in order to access the federation-wide data (actually, the objects and interactions exchanged in federation). RTI is middleware broker software that manages the federation execution and object exchange through a federation execution.The RACoN provides the .NET wrapper classes for the RTI and RTI-specific data structures. As it offers more maintainable, robust, and portable methods, developing an abstraction layer (wrapper) over RTI is a popular approach in many HLA-based projects.Adopting the bridge and the wrapper façade design patterns, the RTI implementation and the abstraction of services are separated in order to handle multiple HLA specifications and vendor specific RTI. The wrapper façade design pattern is mainly used to hide the complex, error-prone, and low-level functions behind a uniform class interface. Additionally, it is also used to wrap the native C++ interface to obtain a .NET interface to provide language independency (only for .NET languages). For the architecture and the technical details, confer to (Topcu 2013 and Topcu 2011).RACoN is composed of two packages: (1) Federation and (2) RTILayer. It includes a generic federate implementation, which is an extension point inherited by each federate.

SimGe is a code generator for the RACoN platform.

Currently, the main limitations of RACoN are as follows.

• RACoN fully supports the HLA13 standard and supports most parts of the HLA Evolved standard (IEEE1516-2010).

• The projects using RACoN library must be x64 projects.

Supported Native RTIs: (This imposes the installation of below libraries prior to RACoN)

• HLA1.3: 

  • DMSO RTI-1.3NGv6

  • OpenRTI v0.10.0

• IEEE1516-2010 (HLA Evolved):

  • OpenRTI v0.10.0