An Assistance Tool to Design Interoperable Components for Co-simulation

Abstract

The high number of electronic devices used and their interactions lead us to the transition from a vision of multi-functions systems, used independently, to systems that are actually distributed and scattered in the environment. The heterogeneity of the components constituting some of these systems ultimately leads to call them "complex". When a complex system [1] requires the use of different components specified by different designers working on different domains, this greatly increases the number of virtual prototypes. Unfortunately, these components tend to remain too independent of one another, thus preventing both the designers from collaborating and their system from being interconnected in order to full one or more tasks that could not be performed by one of these elements only. The need for communication and co-operation is necessary and encourages the designer (s) to inter-operate them for the implementation of a co-simulation [2] encouraging dialogue between disciplines and reducing errors, costs and Development time. In this article, we describe an assistance tool in order to generate black-box components, facilitating this design task for novices.