A Heterogeneous Simulation and Modeling Framework for Automation Systems

Recently, new technologies have emerged in industrial automation platforms. A rapid modeling and simulation environment is required to integrate these new technologies with existing devices and platforms to reduce the design effort and time to market. System-level modeling is a popular design technique that provides early simulation, verification, and architectural exploration. However, integration of real devices with system models is quite challenging due to synchronization and hard real-time constraints in industrial automation. SystemC is the most commonly used system-level language in hardware-software codesign. However, SystemC lacks interfaces for the integration of system (virtual) models with real (physical) devices. We introduce the hybrid channel concept to clearly define the integration interface. Hybrid channel incorporates both real-to-virtual and virtual-to-real communication functions by solving synchronization issues while satisfying the real-time constraints. We successfully demonstrated the usability of our framework in industrial systems that utilize BACNet and Ethernet. We also developed a mathematical model that correctly estimates the results of our experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework and mathematical model for SystemC in industrial automation domain.