A test facility for experimental HIL analysis of industrial embedded control systems

It is well known that the performance of real-time control applications can be affected by many factors, including the choice (and configuration) of the hardware platform and task scheduling algorithm. This paper presents a real-time hardware-in-the-loop simulation tool that simultaneously integrates concepts from control and real-time computing to allow further investigation into these links. It allows the experimental prototyping and analysis of real-time control systems on real hardware - but within a simulated plant environment -and thus allows the potential impacts of hardware and software architecture on control performance and dependability to be evaluated. The structure of the proposed tool is described, along with a preliminary experiment that has been performed to illustrate some of the test facility capabilities.