A Tool Integration Approach for Architectural Exploration of Aircraft EPS with Ptolemy II / Metro II

For emerging safety-critical systems, novel design methodologies are becoming necessary to cope with early stage design validation, performance and timing prediction, and design space exploration. In this paper, we propose a tool integration technique for architectural exploration of an aircraft electric power system (EPS) controller using Ptolemy II and Metro II to satisfy requirements imposed on safety-critical system design. The functional model of a newly suggested co-simulation environment is implemented with Ptolemy II and the model for architectural exploration is realized by SystemC. To construct the co-simulation environment and combine the functional model and the architectural model, Metro II semantics is employed. We verify effectiveness and extensibility of our new approach using experiments and results with example candidates for the aircraft EPS controller.