Ptolemy-HLA: A Cyber-Physical System Distributed Simulation Framework

Abstract

The Ptolemy-HLA distributed co-simulation framework leverages two open source tools, Ptolemy II and HLA/CERTI, for the simulation of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). This framework enables dealing with three important issues: (1) Distribution of a simulation, allowing to scale up models and performance; (2) Interoperability of tools, allowing reusability and interfacing with other simulators or real devices/systems; (3) Heterogeneous simulations (discrete events, continuous time). The framework extends Ptolemy both, by coordinating the time advance of various Ptolemy instances, and by allowing data communication between them with the help of HLA management services. These additions enable the creation of HLA federates (i.e., simulators) in a Federation (i.e., a distributed simulation) in an easy way, since the user does not need to be an HLA specialist in order to design a Federate. The paper presents the new components added to Ptolemy, some semantic issues, an application example and performance analysis.