The CAOS problem-solving environment ::recent developments

We present recent developments of the CAOS problem-solving environment (PSE), an IDL-based software tool whose original aim was to define and simulate as realistically as possible the behavior of a generic adaptive optics (AO) system -from the atmospheric propagation of light, to the sensing of the wave-front aberrations and the correction through a deformable mirror- but which results in a widely more general tool now. In fact, the different developments made through the last years result in a very versatile numerical tool complete of a global graphical interface (the CAOS Application Builder), a general utilities library (the CAOS Library), and different packages dedicated to a wide range of astronomical-optics-related scientific topics: the original package designed for end-to-end AO system simulations (the Software Package CAOS), an image simulation/ reconstruction package with interferometric capabilities (the Software Package AIRY), an extension of the latter specialized for the LBT instrument LINC-NIRVANA (the Software Package AIRY-LN), an ad hoc package dedicated to the VLT instrument SPHERE (the Software Package SPHERE), and an embedment of the analytical AO simulation code PAOLA (the Software Package PAOLAC).We present the status of the whole CAOS PSE, together with the most recent developments, and plans for the future of the overall tool