SystemC based Simulator for Virtual Prototyping of Large Scale Distributed Embedded Control Systems

In this paper we present DESYRE, a SystemC-based virtual prototyping framework, that we have developed to build the simulator of a modern elevator system designed by Otis Elevator Company for large scale buildings. DESYRE aims at the simulation of industrial large-scale real-time distributed embedded systems and allows: the verification of the system functionality, taking into account the distribution over the network, the prediction of the performance, such as end-to-end latency, and the usage of the communication and computation resources for the entire range of scalability of the system. In the paper, we describe the framework details and its application to the construction of the virtual prototype of a scalable elevator system based on the CAN communication protocol. We show the tuning and validation of the simulated model against a test system composed of 24 physical nodes, linked to network and logic analyzers. We finally present results on the simulation of significant case studies (up to 20 floors and 8 cars, that corresponds to hundreds of interconnected nodes, having about 10 subcomponents each) to predict the scalability performances of the shared communication resources.