Prologue to ADTF FEP Integration

What is FEP ?

FEP is the abbreviation for Functional Engineering Platform and names a product family based on automatic network discovery and routing concept for distributed executables and functions. FEP releases the developer from many of the challenges and hassles of implementing a distributed system by providing a readily connected base implementation, prepared for data exchange without any further effort from the developer. This out-of-the-box distributed system can easily be extended with custom FEP Participants. (copied from the FEP SDK)

Thus results in the benefit that it will connect the world (frameworks, tools and furthermore), you can integrate 3rd party applications and reuse solutions inside your toolchain and do not have to reinvent the wheel. Imagine you have a good application for data processing and another for verification. If you (or the community) provide a FEP Participant for both, you combining both technologies, without any costs fro postprocessing, converting and much more.

Why using FEP in ADTF ?

In the context of ADTF 3 it will replace the old Message Bus known from ADTF 2 and provide a lot more than just a simulation bus to exchange data between multiple ADTF instances.

One important requirement of ADTF is abstracting generic solutions to make the user focus on the real problem - FEP integration closes the next open issues. ADTF provides already tools and concepts for designing and controlling setups, so we will extend it step by step to extend our mind and setups from the "closed" ADTF System to whole FEP System - as another base requirement: ADTF connects!

FEP Community

FEP is an Open Source Project and combination of several repositories available at github. You will find our forks and link to the origin here. Feel free to participate and getting more understanding by looking inside the documentation and source code.

Where to go next?

Of course FEP can not be explained in a few words but you should now have a basic understanding what is happen here. Let's dive in launch your first FEP System in our Getting Started guide.