Simulation Alternatives for Modeling Networked Cyber-Physical Systems

Several embedded system applications are used to control physical processes. Sensing, computation and actuation are combined thus involving a set of highly heterogeneous components, i.e., digital and analog hardware, software, energy sources, and external environment. Moreover, the growing use of networks contributes to introduce a further level of heterogeneity. All these aspects should be taken into account in the design process to find highly optimized solutions, therefore a Cyber-Physical System approach is needed. In particular, simulation is a key technique in the different design stages. However, the heterogeneity of components, together with the presence of the network, forces to adopt complex and slow co-simulation techniques to carry on the simulation of the entire system. This work aims at proposing SystemC as unified framework to model and simulate Networked Cyber-Physical Systems. Concerning the modeling of continuous-time components and a specific class of discrete-time components, the different Models of Computation provided by the Analog/Mixed-Signal (AMS) extension of SystemC are used. Regarding the network, SystemC and the SystemC Network Simulation Library are used to model communications at different abstraction levels. The accuracy and speed of different simulation alternatives are compared by the application to a networked control system.