Fast Virtual Prototyping of Cyber-Physical Systems using SystemC and FMI

The design of Cyber-Physical Systems is becoming challenging due to their growing complexity. Simulation has proven to be effective for design validation of such complex systems at low cost. In particular, virtual prototyping allows early validation of hardware/software components. Considering the full cyber-physical context of a system allows more accurate testing and validation. This paper presents a fast virtual prototyping method for hardware and software co-validation through co-simulation of the whole Cyber-Physical System. The presented solution is based on FMI, a widely adopted standard for multi-domain co-simulation. The VPSim virtual prototyping tool is adapted to comply with the FMI standard. As such, an FMU that encapsulates a virtual hardware/software platform can be easily and automatically generated using a high-level description of the hardware/software architecture. This FMU can then be incorporated in any FMI-compliant simulation tool. The proposed approach features a parallel implementation of the generated FMU to improve the co-simulation performance. An ADAS use-case is used to validate the proposed solution. Obtained results show that a real-time factor of 0.9 can be achieved using the proposed solution.