Supporting the Engineering of Multi-Fidelity Simulation Units With Simulation Goals

To conceive a CPS is a complex and multidisciplinary endeavour involving different stakeholders, potentially using a plethora of different languages to describe their views of the system at different levels of abstraction. Model-Driven Engineering comes, precisely, as a methodological approach to tackle the complexity of systems development with models as first-class citizens in the development process. The measure of realism of these models with respect to the real (sub)system is called fidelity. Usually, different models with different fidelity are then developed during the development process. Additionally, it is very common that the development process of CPS includes an incremental (and collaborative) use of simulations to study the behaviour emerging from the heterogeneous models of the system. Currently, the different models, with different fidelity, are managed in an ad hoc manner. Consequently, when a (Co)simulation is used to study a specific property of the system, the choice of the different models and their setup is made manually in a non-tractable way. In this paper we propose a structured new vision to CPS development, where the notion of simulation goal and multi-fidelity simulation unit are first-class citizens. The goal is to make a clear link between the system requirements, the system properties, the simulation goal and the multi-fidelity simulation unit. The outcome of this framework is a way to automatically determine the model at an adequate fidelity level suitable for answering a specific simulation goal.

I. Introduction

A Cyber-Physical System (CPS) [1] is an integration of computation with physical processes whose behavior is defined by both physical and cyber parts. To understand the emerging behavior of the system, one cannot comprehend the computational and physical parts separately. It is then required that several stakeholders, some of which are specialists in various domains involved in the system, participate and collaborate in the system development process.