Scheduling Real-Time HiL Co-Simulation of Cyber-Physical Systems on Multi-Core Architectures

Abstract

When designing complex cyber-physical systems, engineers have to integrate numerical models from different modeling environments in order to simulate the whole system and estimate its global performances. Co-simulation refers to such joint simulation of heterogeneous models. If some parts of the system are physically available, it is possible to connect these parts to the co-simulation in a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) approach. In this case, the simulation has to be performed in realtime where models execution consists in periodically reacting to the real (physically available) components and providing periodic output updates. This paper deals with the parallelization and scheduling of real-time Hardware-in-the-Loop co-simulation of numerical models on multi-core architectures. A method for defining real-time constraints that have to be met is proposed. Also, an ILP formulation as well as a heuristic are proposed to solve the problem of scheduling the co-simulation on a multicore architecture while satisfying the previously defined real-time constraints. The proposed approach is evaluated for different sizes of co-simulations and multi-core processors.