Master for Simulation Control using the Distributed Co-Simulation Protocol

Simulation techniques are used throughout industrial development and testing processes today. The idea of co-simulation has become widely known in the last decade and is successfully applied today. The integration of tools, models, and solvers contributes to efficient simulation based solutions. The functional mock-up interface (FMI) represents a standardized solution in this field, which is available in many tools and has proven successful for industrial development. A standardized solution for inclusion of real-time systems in the loop is currently not available. The distributed co-simulation protocol (DCP) is subject to proposal as a standard for real-time and non-real-time system integration and simulation. It was developed in context of the ACOSAR project. The DCP specification defines the design of a slave, that may include various kinds of real-time or nonreal- time systems, like electronic control units, engine test beds or software simulation tools. It requires the usage of an underlying transport protocol. However, to control one or multiple DCP slaves and integrate them into simulation environments, a DCP master is required. The design of a DCP master is not in scope of the DCP specification. In this paper we present a state machine that can be used to implement a master which is compliant to the DCP specification in order to control a co-simulation scenario.