Java Run-Time Infrastructure (JRTI) is a project which is part of the fourth year projects in the Department of Computer System Engineering at Carleton University. The Project is supervised by Prof. Trevor W. Pearce.

The High Level Architecture (or HLA) was developed by the United States’ Department of Defense in the early 1990’s to cut the cost of developing simulation systems. Before the development of the HLA, simulation systems were being developed from the ground-up. The HLA was to facilitate the development of simulation systems by providing a set of rules and standards to promote simulation interoperability and reuse. As of September 2000, The HLA became an IEEE standard for simulation interoperability (IEEE 1516). This would allow more commercial industries to adopt the HLA and facilitate for a broader adoption of the HLA internationally.

The RTI is the HLA middleware that enables simulation components (federates) to communicate and function with each other to create a full simulation (federation).

The goal of this project is the development of a configurable and portable RTI called the CU-jFDK. Prior to the development of CU-jFDK, RTI’s were often limited in portability due to the fact that they were developed to run on a specific platform. This made it costly and time consuming to use the RTI on different platforms since it would require the developer to manage different RTI implementations for each platform. Furthermore, the Georgia Tech FDK was the only RTI developed to be configurable. To solve these problems, a configurable, platform independent implementation of the RTI was required. Creating an RTI implementation in Java allows the CU-jFDK to run on any operating system running the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) without the need for any modifications. This is considered to be a great advantage since it allows RTI developers and users to use the RTI on many platforms. This not only allows the RTI to be versatile but it will reduce maintenance cost as well.