A practical infrastructure for real-time simulation across timing domains

Abstract

A real-time infrastructure, called MLRTI, is proposed in this paper to fulfill the requirement of real-time simulation in distributed environment. There are two novel contributions in this work. Firstly, a flexible timing mechanism is proposed to integrate external time source and local timer utility, enabling the distributed nodes to advance their timeline simultaneously at different speeds with high precision. A data transmission solution is also presented in which the reflective memory card (VMIC) is employed to provide fast data transmission with minimum delay. Secondly, a system partition schema is proposed in MLRTI to reduce the solution errors introduced by transforming a continuous system into distribution system, which is common in a class of control applications where the system is designed in centralized model but simulated in distributed environment for constrains on system structure or the need to balance computation load. Experiments are conducted and the results show this schema effectively reduces the possible errors by properly partitioning the system into parts that are suitable to be deployed in distributed environment.