Intro: ATLAS management has decided to abandon, on a time scale of a few years, the current simulation and reconstruction code, which is almost entirely written in FORTRAN, relying on Zebra for data management.

It is planned to start an independent effort to be written in C++, using object-oriented design techniques, and following a management plan known as the ATLAS Software Process (ASP)

I will present a prototype for what that “program” might become, but addressing the wishes of many people who want to start designing and implementing detector reconstruction algorithms now.

Thus Arve has several features that are designed to facilitate development:

• simplified control
• integrated 3-d graphics, (hopefully) easy to generate new representations
• built-in simulation