Easy and Automatic CMake based Project Generation for Large-Scale Simulation Applications

When working with large-scale software projects, it is essential to use a meta-build system in order to maintain flexibility in terms of the build system used. At the Department of Flight Dynamics and Simulation (FDS) in the Institute of Flight Systems (FT) of German Aerospace Center (DLR), there exists several such large-scale projects, for instance in the Air Vehicle Simulator (AVES). AVES utilises the real-time simulation framework 2Simulate, which consists of multiple subprojects. Currently, 2Simulate relies on a project structure that enables to build with Visual Studio and Unix Makefiles. Migrating from such existing project structures to a meta-build system is time-consuming, and requires a coordinated design approach. To address this issue, this paper proposes the introduction of an abstraction layer to cross-platform Make (CMake) with regards to research specific requirements based on the meta-build system CMake. The general concept for this approach is based on state of the art principles from web development. The approach aims to create a uniform project standard while applying common software development best practices.