Distributed real-time simulation of numerical models : application to power-train

Overview & Synopsis

Nowadays the validation of Electronic Control Units ECUs generally relies on Hardware-in-The-Loopsimulation where the lacking physical systems are modeled using hybrid differential equations. Theincreasing complexity of this kind of models makes the trade-off between time efficiency and the simulationaccuracy hard to satisfy. This thesis investigates and proposes some analytical and experimentalmethods towards weakly-hard real-time co-simulation of hybrid dynamical models. It seeks in particularto define solutions in order to exploit more efficiently the parallelism provided by multi-core architecturesusing new methods and paradigms of resource allocation. The first phase of the thesis studied the possibilityof using step-size and order control numerical integration methods with events detection in thecontext of real-time modular co-simulation when the time constraints are considered weakly-hard. Moreover,the execution order of the different models was studied to show the influence of keeping or not thedata dependencies between coupled models on the simulation results. We proposed for this aim a newmethod of co-simulation that allows the full parallelism between models implying supra-linear speed-upswithout adding errors related to their execution order. Finally, the delay errors due to the communicationstep-size between the models were improved thanks to a proposed context-based inputs extrapolation.All proposed approaches target constructively to enhance the simulation speed for the compliance toreal-time constraints while keeping the quality and accuracy of simulation results under control and theyare validated through several test and experiments on an internal combustion engine model and integratedto a prototype version of the xMOD software.