Towards an interoperable framework for mixed real-time simulations of industrial embedded systems

Simulations are often used to improve the development and test time of industrial embedded systems in different domains, such as healthcare, railway, automobile and aerospace. This paper introduces a general framework capable of simulating real components simultaneously with simulated ones, in real-time, and with a low impact on the performance of the overall system. Our framework is loosely dependent on the application and the domain where the application is developed in. More importantly, it enhances interoperability and reuse, because it paves the way to reuse existing simulating tools and models and to integrate separately developed models from earlier stages in the design into a single coherent simulation.