Parallel and distributed cyber-physical system simulation

textThe traditions of real-time and embedded system engineering have evolved into a new field of cyber-physical systems (CPSs). The increase in complexity of CPS components and the multi-domain engineering composition of CPSs challenge the current best practices in design and simulation. To address the challenges of CPS simulation, this work introduces a simulator coordination method drawing from strengths of the field of parallel and distributed simulation (PADS), yet offering benefits aimed towards the challenges of coordinating CPS engineering design simulators. The method offers the novel concept of Interpolated Event data types applied to Kahn Process Networks in order to provide simulator coordination. This can enable conservative and optimistic coordination of multiple heterogeneous and homogeneous simulators, but provide important benefits for CPS simulation, such as the opportunity to reduce functional requirements for simulator interfacing compared to existing solutions. The method is analyzed in theoretical properties and instantiated in software tools SimConnect and SimTalk. Finally, an experimental study applies the method and tools to accelerate Spice circuit simulation with tradeoffs in speed versus accuracy, and demonstrates the coordination of three heterogeneous simulators for a CPS simulation with increasing component model refinement and realism.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Towards transparent optimistic synchronization in HLA

In this paper we propose a software architecture for achieving completely transparent optimistic synchronization in the High-Level-Architecture (HLA), namely the emerging standard for the interoperability and the integration of heterogeneous simulators. The software architecture is based on a layer called MAgic State Manager (MASM), which we have designed and implemented for transparently handling state related operations (i.e. checkpointing and recovery), and on an additional software layer, we propose in this paper, acting as Rollback Controller (RC) and taking care of all the other operations (e.g. event retractions) required to support optimistic synchronization. Compared to existing proposals, which only partially move synchronization related operations outside the application level code, our proposal has the advantage of completely removing the need for modules in support of optimistic synchronization at the application level, thus strongly simplifying the application level programmer job. © 2005 IEEE