Early Insights on FMI-based Co-Simulation of Aircraft Vehicle Systems

Abstract

Modelling and Simulation is extensively used for aircraft vehicle system development at Saab Aeronautics in Linköping, Sweden. There is an increased desire to simulate interacting sub-systems together in order to reveal, and get an understanding of, the present cross-coupling effects early on in the development cycle of aircraft vehicle systems. The co-simulation methods implemented at Saab require a significant amount of manual effort, resulting in scarcely updated simulation models, and challenges associated with simulation model scalability, etc. The Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) standard is identified as a possible enabler for efficient and standardized export and co-simulation of simulation models developed in a wide variety of tools. However, the ability to export industrially relevant models in a standardized way is merely the first step in simulating the targeted coupled sub-systems. Selecting a platform for efficient simulation of the system under investigation is the next step. Here, a strategy for adapting coupled Modelica models of aircraft vehicle systems to TLM-based simulation is presented. An industry-grade application example is developed, implementing this strategy, to be used for preliminary investigation and evaluation of a cosimulation framework supporting the Transmission Line element Method (TLM). This application example comprises a prototype of a small-scale aircraft vehicle systems simulator. Examples of aircraft vehicle systems are environmental control systems, fuel systems, and hydraulic systems. The tightly coupled models included in the application example are developed in Dymola, OpenModelica, and Matlab/Simulink. The application example is implemented in the commercial modelling tool Dymola to provide a reference for a TLM-based master simulation tool, supporting both FMI and TLM. The TLM-based master simulation tool TLMSimulator is investigated in terms of model import according to the FMI standard with respect to a specified set of industrial needs and requirements.

Holistic simulation for integrated vehicle design

“…the consortium of the MODELISAR project with the purpose of supporting the exchange of numerical models of subsystems [23]. Initially developed for vehicular embedded system design, FMI is starting to be used in other engineering sectors [9], [24], [25], [26]. FMI is a popular software agnostic communication protocol between simulation environments that allows for models to be used in a wide array of software that support the protocol [8], [9], [12], [27].…”

“…FMI for Model Exchange runs on the solver of the host platform [24], [23], [28]. As a result, no coupling or extrapolation errors are introduced.…”

Realizing Interoperability between MBSE Domains in Aircraft System Development

“…However, as visualized in Figure 1, combining the two standards enables interoperability between all the considered M&S application levels of abstraction. The industrial feasibility and strengths of the FMI and SSP standards have been demonstrated in numerous publications within the aeronautical industry [26][27][28] and the automotive industry [29]. Furthermore, initiatives related to managing SSP and FMI compliant digital artifacts throughout a product life cycle is ongoing in both industry and academia.…”

“…A simulator enabling detailed studies of pilot thermal comfort was presented in [26]. The ECS incorporated in application example one is based on the aircraft cooling system of that simulator.…”

Ontology-based system to support industrial system design for aircraft assembly

“…Although research and development have been conducted applying MBSE to the aircraft product design, the aircraft manufacturing filed is only gaining attentions recently, whereby several corresponding researches are mentioned in (Mas et al 2018). It still lacks solutions to meet the needs of designing an industrial system for aircraft assembly; (3) Unlike the analysis and evaluation in the context of Design-to-Product, such as supporting development of an aircraft system through a Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) based cosimulation (Hallqvist et al 2017), Design-to-Manufacturing focuses rather on evaluation of factors in manufacturing, such as cost, lead time, etc. It requires to be addressed.…”