Configuration of Slaves Based on the Distributed Co-Simulation Protocol

Virtual system development becomes increasingly important in many industrial domains. It is considered to reduce development times, lower computing costs, and shorten time-to-market. Co-simulation is a particularly promising approach for modular and interoperable development. The Functional Mock-Up Interface (FMI) provides a standardized solution for integration of simulation models, tools and solvers. The integration and coupling of real-time and non-real-time systems still requires enormous efforts. The Distributed Co-Simulation Protocol (DCP) is a novel, freely available specification to unify the integration of real-time and non-real-time systems of different providers. The DCP specifies a simulation cycle of five phases, including a configuration phase. It predetermines the configuration for data exchange of a co-simulation scenario. The exact generation of this configuration is not part of the DCP specification. This paper presents a co-simulation scenario description file format and an algorithm generating such a configuration. An XML schema description is used to describe a co-simulation scenario. We propose a bin packing algorithm which operates based on information provided with this XML file. This approach allows to create different configurations for the DCP in a fast and efficient way. To highlight the applicability of the proposed XML schema description and algorithm, a co-simulation scenario from the automotive domain is shown. It is used to generate three different DCP configurations, and to highlight their impact on network performance.