A Framework for Automated Model Interface Coordination Using SysML

Abstract

Integrated vehicle simulation models are being increasingly used to improve engineering efficiency and reduce the number of real-world prototypes needed to understand vehicle attributes and subsystem interactions. Each domain within the vehicle must be represented by its own model developed with the appropriate operating ranges, behaviors, fidelity, and interfaces needed to interact appropriately with other domains in the vehicle. Planning and managing the development of these models across a large, multidisciplinary group of engineers can be a significant effort. In particular, carefully managing each model’s interfaces is crucial to enabling the entire process; missing or inappropriately used signals can cause significant issues when many separate domain models are integrated into a single vehicle model. To help system engineers better manage these interfaces across a broad variety of applications, a SysML-based modeling approach is proposed to describe these models and their interfaces formally and completely. However, even with a consistent modeling approach, creating and managing the interfaces across a large number of domains and applications can be a significant, error-prone task. To reduce the amount of manual modeling work required to maintain and update Simulink model interfaces, an interface management toolset is proposed to help automate the process of importing existing interfaces, routing and visualizing them, and exporting model templates for developers to use when creating new models. By automating this process, it becomes significantly easier to reuse models across vehicle platforms (rather than creating new models from scratch) and frees up resources to create more accurate simulations throughout the system design process.