Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University's research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html This document may differ from the final, published version of the research and has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies. To read and/or cite from the published version of the research, please visit the publisher's website (a subscription may be required.) Abstract: In the field of modeling and simulation of a complex mechatronics system, such as high speed trains, it is relatively difficult to model the entire system because it involves complex multi-disciplinary subsystems. Therefore, the component-based modeling strategy is presented to first build up simulation models for all the subsystems, which are relatively domain independent and then to coordinate all subsystems' simulation consistently to achieve a coupled simulation of the entire system. However, the dynamic behaviors of individual subsystems are different, thus each individual subsystem requires a different integral step size in its simulation in order to make its state and behavior simulation smoothly and steadily. Meanwhile, completion of one-step integration of a subsystem needs different computational time. This gives rise to a twofold challenge: spatial and time unsynchronizations among subsystem simulations.The core of the weak coupling simulation of multiple subsystems is to exchange the state and behavior data among relative subsystems at a given position and drive them to start the following step simulation together, thus, the use of a spatiotemporal synchronization process control is necessary. This paper proposes a new collaborative simulation method with spatiotemporal synchronization process control for coupling simulation of a given complex mechatronics system with multiple subsystems. The method consists of (1) a coupler-based coupling mechanisms to define the interfaces and interaction mechanisms among subsystems and (2) a simulation process control algorithm to realize the coupling simulation in a spatiotemporal synchronized manner. The proposed method well supports complex design process planning and design automation.The test results from a case study show that the proposed method can indeed be used to simulate the interactions among the sub-systems under different sim...
