BDViSim: An Open-Source Web Application Platform for Visual Simulation of China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System

As an essential national space-time infrastructure, the BeiDou navigation satellite system (BDS) comprehensively empowers the Internet of Things and enhances the development of the digital economy. Due to prominent issues, such as complex system engineering, inaccessible space environments, and obscure theoretical abstractions, it is difficult to understand intuitively the working mechanism of BDS. For the simulation and visualization of satellite navigation systems, the existing commercial software is characterized by high acquisition costs, strong professionalism, and complex operations that restrict improvements in practical and innovative abilities. Therefore, developing an open and shared visual simulation platform to help users intuitively understand BDS is an urgent task. This paper presents BeiDou visual simulation platform (BDViSim), an open-source web application platform for visual simulation, to intuitively demonstrate BDS’s spatial structural characteristics, functional innovation features, and positioning performance advantages. BDViSim utilizes the flexible, convenient, and powerful platform provided by the Cesium virtual earth engine with the Browser/Server (B/S) architecture, which implements visual simulation functions such as orbit calculation, constellation simulation, and service performance. Users can easily access the platform on any browser, making it a convenient tool and platform for BDS visualization analysis. In addition, the open-source code provided by BDViSim can supply reference information for developers interested in building similar visual simulation web application platforms.