Roller coasters are an attractive, adventurous and exciting form of entertainment. In this paper, we present a virtual roller coaster system, which includes roller coaster simulation software, a motion platform and a motion control unit. We investigate the track structure of the roller coaster and propose a methodology to generate the track automatically. We also simulate the forces exerted on the running carriage to give the user the impression he/she is riding a real roller coaster. A motion platform with two degrees of freedom is constructed using hydraulic cylinders for its actuators. An electronic circuit is designed to allow the motion platform to communicate with the host computer. We also provide flexibility for changing the track type and the surrounding scenery, in order to give the rider a variety of exciting experiences. This system also considers safety concerns in the design of the motion platform.

This paper proposes an integration framework to develop real-time monitor programs based on software reuse. A custom-made real-time monitor program can be quickly built by integrating existing monitor programs in commercial operating systems, where limited real-time system and programming support is provided. We consider issues related to the software control, output re-processing, data age, and interactivities of program executions. The feasibility of this framework is demonstrated by the construction of an integration environment and a soft real-time monitor program consisting of the existing monitor programs PView NT Task Manager, NT Performance Monitor and NT File System Monitor in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. Our experimental results show that the incurred system overheads of this approach are very limited.