Tool supporting the co-design of control systems and their real-time implementation: Current status and future directions

Control systems design has traditionally been treated separately from the design of its software and hardware implementation. The increasing use of embedded control in for example distributed, safety critical and mass-produced systems has caused an increasing need for the simultaneous consideration of the control system and its implementation platform during development. To this end, there is a need for both theoretical contributions and supporting tools that assist designers in understanding and analyzing the intricate relationships between the qualities, such as control performance, robustness and cost, and design parameters related to control system and platform design. This paper explores issues in co-design. A number of representative tools are compared with the purposes of illustrating different approaches concerning the levels of abstraction, analysis vs. synthesis features, constraints addressed and usability features. A perspective to the co-design tools is also provided, where opportunities and challenges for future design environments are discussed.