Architectural Design Space Exploration of Cyber-physical Systems Using the Functional Modeling Compiler

Abstract

This paper reports our experience in the development of a novel concept design support tool for cyber-physical systems (CPS). We show that the various disciplines in CPS design can be brought together to enhance the communication and requirements negotiation among engineers and organizations, to enable multi-disciplinary simulations to evaluate the system-level impact of domain-specific design decisions, and to reduce the overall design cycle. Our method relies on functional modeling to create a technology-independent description of what the system does, and uses a Functional Modeling Compiler (FMC) to synthesize technology-dependent solutions that can be directly used to perform architectural design space exploration using multi-disciplinary simulations in AMESim and Modelica. We show that our FMC is capable of performing detailed multi-domain design space exploration of realistic automotive architectures.