Concept Design: Modeling and Synthesis from Requirements to Functional Models and Simulation

Abstract

Cyber physical systems (CPS) design has become more challenging due to the tight integration of the cyber and physical worlds and the use of cross-domain engineering practices. Moreover, competition in the market in terms of quality, innovation, cost, and time-to-market makes CPS design even harder for the engineers. These challenges advocate for the adoption of integrated engineering methods and tools by CPS design engineers. In addition, state-of-the-art engineering tools are very domain specific, making it difficult to integrate different tools for system-level analysis. This chapter discusses a novel multi-disciplinary systems engineering methodology and related design automation techniques for a complex CPS presented in Wan et al. (IEEE Syst J 11(4):2028–2039, 2017). Instead of domain-specific architecture/simulation models, this method directly targets the early design stage at the functional level. It enables the coupling of systems engineering principles with high-level synthesis techniques from the field of design automation. This blend results in a functional modeling synthesis tool capable of generating high-fidelity simulation models for the design space exploration and validation of multiple cyber-physical architectures. Using real-world automotive use-cases, it is demonstrated how functional models capturing integrated cyber-physical requirements are synthesized into high-fidelity multi-domain simulation models.