Systems Engineering and Simulation: Towards a Unified Methodology for Developing Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are becoming indispensable in numerous industries. By combining computational intelligence with physical capabilities, they enable new functionalities and applications. Systems Engineering (SE) and simulations are commonly used processes to manage the resulting ever increasing system complexity. While simulation engineers focus on virtually replicating the behavior of individual components, systems engineers aim for formal architectures to describe the structure and behavior of the entire system. Despite their resemblance at first sight, the interactions and exchange of system knowledge between these two disciplines is still challenging, as SE models and simulation models are disjoint. There is great potential in better integrating SE models with simulation models. A survey of modeling languages suitable for designing CPS reveals syntactic similarities but semantic differences. To bridge the gap between SE and simulation, we propose an extensible data model that combines structural modeling approaches with simulation functionality and a mechanism to manage the resulting models. In this paper, the developed data model is implemented in a Virtual Testbed and applied to a modular satellite system.