A Tool for Simulation and Fast Prototyping of Embedded Control Systems

This paper presents a set of C++ libraries, called RTSIM, aimed at realizing a joint simulation of a continuous plant and of a real-time embedded controller. The libraries permit a separate specification of the functional behaviour of the controller and of the software platform to be used for its deployment. In particular, it is possible to provide an accurate modeling of the concurrent architecture of the control tasks and of the run-time support offered by the operating system for the real-time scheduling of the shared resources (CPU, memory buffers, network links). In this way, its is possible to compare different scheduling solutions by evaluating their simulated performance in the domain of the control application. Moreover, the tool can be utilized to tune up such design parameters as the activation frequencies of the tasks. The application of the tool is shown on a meaningful robotic case-study.