A flexible environment for rapid prototyping and analysis of distributed real-time safety-critical systems

Currently, there is a plethora of low-cost commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware available for implementing control systems. These range from devices with fairly low intelligence, e.g. smart sensors and actuators, to dedicated controllers such as PowerPC, programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and PC-based boards to dedicated systems-on-a-chip (SoC) ASICS and FPGAs. When considering the construction of complex distributed systems, e.g. for a ship, aircraft, car, train, process plant, the ability to rapidly integrate a variety of devices from different manufacturers is essential. A problem, however, is that manufacturers prefer to supply proprietary tools for programming their products. As a consequence of this lack of ‘openness’, rapid prototyping and development of distributed systems is extremely difficult and costly for a systems integrator. Great opportunities thus exist to produce high-performance, dependable distributed systems. However, the key element that is missing is software tool support for systems integration. The objective of the Flexible Control Systems Development and Integration Environment for Control Systems (FLEXICON) project IST-2001-37269 is to solve these problems for industry and reduce development and implementation costs for distributed control systems by providing an integrated suite of tools to support all the development life-cycle of the system. Work within the Rolls-Royce supported University Technology Centre (UTC) is investigating rapid prototyping of controllers for aero-engines, unmanned aerial vehicles and ships. This paper describes the use of the developed co-simulation environment for a high-speed merchant vessel propulsion system application.