Model-Based Simulation of Distributed Real-time Applications

In the embedded (real-time) systems domain, data-flow based modeling tools like Matlab Simulink or SCADE^reg are increasingly used, because they not only allow for specifying functionality at a level closer to the semantics and terminology of the application domain than a conventionally used programming language like C, but also to simulate the designed model and such the specified behavior in an early project phase. However, in general such tools provide rather little support for simulating complete distributed real-time systems because of the lack of modeling communication aspects like latencies. Hence, this paper discusses an approach for simulating distributed time-triggered systems using SCADE, where the temporal requirements are imported from a platform independent model of the distributed system.