Automatic Generation of Workflows for Efficient Design Space Exploration for Cyber-Physical Systems

As cyber-physical systems become more complex, the engineering domains involved in their design become more and more intertwined. In these situations, a traditional (sequential) design process becomes inefficient in finding good design options, likely requiring multiple (costly) iterations to arrive at a good overall design. Instead, an integrated approach is desired where design variables in multiple different engineering domains can be chosen, evaluated, and optimized to achieve a good overall solution. However, in such an integrated approach, the combined design space becomes vast. As such, an efficient design space exploration (DSE) workflow is needed to minimize the computation time required to find good solutions. In the current paper, we present an approach to automatically determine efficient design space exploration workflows for engineering problems involving multiple engineering domains, such as mechatronics. We do this by explicitly capturing and modeling the relationships between system properties across different engineering domains. We then use this information to generate a set of possible DSE workflows. We also present a method for evaluating these generated workflows based on the expected computation time required to execute them. We demonstrate this approach using a simple example case study and compare the automatically determined DSE workflow to a previously manually determined workflow.