Object-oriented Design Patterns for Parallel Discrete Event Simulation of Distributed Control Systems

Abstract

Distributed control systems (DCS) consist of many sensors/actuators and a network interconnecting them, and are being introduced in various automation areas. For assuring the control performance of a DCS under heavy communication traffic, the precise simulation of the DCS is strongly needed. For this purpose, we propose a uniform, efficient and systematic method based on object-oriented design patterns for modeling and simulating DCSs. In this paper, two design patterns are newly proposed; Time-Warp pattern and Protocol pattern. Time-Warp pattern describes classes and interaction for executing the DCS simulation by communicating events having send/receive times, using Time Warp mechanism. Protocol pattern describes classes and interaction for uniformly structuring various communication protocol models used in DCSs, which are composed of the interactions among several layers and the state transition of each layer in a communication protocol. Finally, the effectiveness of the DCS simulator which is developed using these patterns was proved by comparing simulation results with the experiment results using the real DCS consisting of four CAN-based control nodes.