Calytrix Technologies and Thales Group have teamed up to enhance the Portico Open Source RTI with an implementation of the IEEE "HLA Evolved" interface. Under development since 2004, The Portico Project aims to deliver a high quality, freely available open source HLA Run-Time Infrastructure to the distributed simulation community. Since its inception the tool has been downloaded over 12,000 times in more than 40 countries.

Working with Thales, Calytrix has updated the Portico RTI to comply with the latest iteration of the HLA standard, IEEE 1516-2010, known as "HLA Evolved". To implementation brings support for the most commonly used services of the new standard to Portico on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. These additions are available in Portico v2.0, released today.

Dan Gregory of the Thales Group Technical Directorate identified barrier-to-entry and high licensing costs as key factors affecting the adoption of HLA standards-based architectures, and key reasons to provide support for an open source solution. “We saw the opportunity for a quick-win in kick-starting HLA adoption, particularly outside the training community. Portico was an obvious choice for meeting this objective.”

Portico was originally developed in 2004 by Tim Pokorny, Chief Technical Officer of Calytrix, under funding from the Australian Defence Simulation Office (ADSO­).  With this latest work, it now supports the most widely-used services of HLA Evolved.

You can download Portico from the website at: http://www.porticoproject.org.

Calytrix provide commercial support for Portico in addition to ongoing development and maintenance activities in an effort to promote open alternatives for critical simulation infrastructure. Commercial support arrangement information is available from Calytrix by emailing