Platform-Independent Debugging of Physical Interaction and Signal Flow Models

Systems engineering tools are used to organize development activities of a wide variety of engineers, many of whom develop discipline-specific simulation models. To increase the efficiency of this process, systems modeling tools have been extended to represent physical interactions and signal flows that can be translated to simulation tools and executed. Sometimes these simulation models fail to execute or they produce unexpected execution results. It is helpful to identify causes of these problems in earlier stages of system model development, before they propagate to fully-developed simulation models. Debugging physical interaction models is difficult because their execution is bidirectional between system components. This paper gives an overview of debugging procedures for physical interactions and (unidirectional) signal flows in platform-independent system models that integrate with domain-specific simulation models. These procedures identify system model causes of simulation execution failure or incorrect simulation results.