Slicing simulation models into co-simulations

Abstract

The emerging generation of large-scale cyber-physical production systems, which represents a backbone of a trend denoted as Industrie 4.0, broadly adopts fundamentals laid by the multi-agent system paradigm. The joint roots of these concepts bring not only advantages such as flexibility, resilience or self-organization, but also severe issues such as difficult validation and verification of their behavior. Simulations are a well proven strategy facilitating these issues. Although simulations as virtual copies of real system behavior are useful test-beds for various experiments and optimizations along the entire industrial plant life-cycle, their design and integration are time-consuming and difficult. This paper proposes a new method to facilitate slicing of a monolithic simulation into a co-simulation, which is a simulation consisting of multiple inter-linked simulation units. The proposed method aims at specifying interfaces of the simulation units as well as routing signals for integrating the simulation units. The method improves engineering and re-design of co-simulations in terms of saving time and effort for creating and integrating complex co-simulations.