Conference article

The Distributed Co-Simulation Protocol (DCP) is a platform and communication system independent application level communication protocol. It is designed to integrate models or real-time systems into simulation environments. The DCP is maintained as an open-access Modelica Association standard, which is compatible to, but not dependent on, the Functional Mock-Up Interface (FMI). The specification document defines the structure and behaviour of slaves. It is advantageous to verify and validate a slave before integrating it into a larger co-simulation scenario. This is especially true if tests are performed on large rigs, where availability and time are typically limited. Until now, no systematic procedure for design, verification and validation of slaves is available. In this paper, we introduce a process for design, verification and validation of DCP slaves. The process is used to systematically encapsulate models or real-time systems into slaves. For verification, the DCP state machine and protocol definitions are used to derive sequences of protocol data units (PDU) from any given DCP slave description. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we show a use case from the automotive engineering domain. It includes a slave representing an engine, which embeds a functional mock-up unit (FMU). We also introduce the DCP test generator and DCP tester tools to automate the verification steps. With these contributions, slaves can be developed systematically and more efficiently. The introduced software is available under an open-source license.

co-simulation, dcp, fmi, protocol-based test, real-time, testing, verification