FLEXICON Development Process with Co-simulation for a Marine Application

Developing distributed control systems requires tools that can deal with high complexity, integrating design information from multiple domains and allowing analysis of the overall design in terms of technical and commercial performance. Currently, no integrated multidisciplinary design tools exist which can do this. Thus, the ability to simulate and assess system performance and rapidly prototype systems is critical. The FLEXICON project aimed to solve these issues and for this a toolset for Marine, Automotive and Aerospace (MAA) applications was created. This paper presents a way to reduce the development process time in the production of a marine application using the MAA toolset and the concept of co-simulation adopted in the FLEXICON project by the University of Sheffield. A reduction of 30% in development was achieved for the Marine application. Information on these results was obtained during the Marine demonstrators activities. Key-Words: Co-simulation, distributed systems, reliability & through-life-cost, development process, modelling.