Customization

The tools that Thinking Systems supports allow for easy customization to extend their capabilities. GMAT, and by extension Paramat, use a robust plug-in subsystem developed at Thinking Systems to extend the capabilities of these tool to meet new mission challenges. We have developed plug-in libraries compatible with GMAT and Paramat both for internal use and for our customers. We have also helped customers use the GMAT plug-in architecture to implement custom components that meet their program needs.

The latest GMAT release (GMAT R2018a) ships with 21 plug-in components on Windows and 20 on Linux and Mac. The analysts at Goddard Space Flight Center use an additional 6 plugin components. Of these, 13 were coded at Thinking Systems, three were ported from internal code to plug-in code by Thinking Systems, and two more were coded by other organizations with support and finalization of the coding performed by Thinking Systems.

Recent work at Thinking Systems includes the extension of the GMAT plug-in interfaces to support external components in GMAT builds, and to include graphical user interface pieces as plug-in components. This work, performed in partnership with Emergent Space Technologies under a NASA SBIR contract, is used for Emergent's OpenFramesInterface plug-in, soon to be available as part of the GMAT system.

The GMAT XY plotting component was originally coded at Thinking Systems. GMAT's XY plotting output is based on the wxWidgets version of the open source TSPlot package, available on SourceForge. Paramat uses a reworked Qt implementation of TSPlot for its plotting features, along with several scripting elements added through a Paramat specific plugin that address the needs of large scale parallel mission design analysis.