University of Twente Student Theses

Evaluating the behavior of embedded control software : using a modular software-in-the-loop simulation environment and a domain specific modeling language for plant modeling

Terwellen, Christian (2012) Evaluating the behavior of embedded control software : using a modular software-in-the-loop simulation environment and a domain specific modeling language for plant modeling.

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Abstract:	During the development of high performance mechatronic systems it is necessary to ensure high quality products and short time-to-market. Because the Embedded Software (ESW) is a fundamental part of such systems, it is necessary to provide a well suited testing environment. A challenge in testing ESW is that its hardware environment, called the plant, is needed to properly evaluate its behavior. It is, in many cases, not feasible to test the ESW on the hardware because there are no, or not enough, hardware resources available. To address this problem, the ESW can be tested using a software simulation of the plant behavior. This leads to several advantages. For example, the plant hardware is not needed for testing the ESW and it is possible to test faster, more frequent and more effective. Since five years, such a simulation environment has been in use at Océ to test the part of the ESW that controls the paper transport inside the printer. This is done by executing the ESW together with a plant model, emulating the hardware included in the paper transport, on a software engineer's workstation. Due to the great success of this simulation environment, the goal of this project is to extend the simulation environment to be able to test the ESW of the whole printer, using simulated plant models. In order to achieve this goal, the architecture of the simulation environment has been reviewed and newly designed to meet the new requirements. The new version of the simulation environment is well prepared for the future use of multiple different plant models, which is important to reach the goal of testing all printer functions in the simulation environment. To support the creation of plant models, a plant modeling framework has been developed. This plant modeling framework enables short modeling times and re- quires only little domain knowledge of the plant concepts and the modeling of physical systems. These are important properties of the framework, since the main users of the framework are software engineers. The evolution of the testing environment has been an important step towards developing high performance printers without the need of hardware prototypes. This leads to lower cost, since there are no costs for hardware. It also leads to a short time-to-market, since no build and adaption time is needed when the hard- ware evolves, and the development of ESW can start earlier in the development process.
Item Type:	Essay (Master)
Faculty:	EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Subject:	54 computer science
Programme:	Computer Science MSc (60300)
Link to this item:	https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/62824
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