Parallel simulation of cyber-physical systems

Model-based design (MBD) in systems engineering is a well-accepted technique to abstract, analyze, verify, and validate complex systems. In MBD, we design a mathematical model of the system to virtually execute and test systems via model simulations to understand the system dynamics better. Computing model simulations has their challenges; one is to ensure that the simulation trajectory preserves the model semantics. Besides, computing many simulation trajectories over a long time-horizon must be time efficient for rapid respond to system engineers. In this work, we address these challenges in simulating models of cyber-physical systems (CPS), particularly systems possessing mixed discrete–continuous dynamics. We focus on the subclass of CPS’s hybrid automata models, where Jump predicates are restricted to polygonal constraints and present a numerical simulation engine that can efficiently compute many random simulations in parallel by exploiting the parallel computing capability in modern multicore processors. Our simulation engine implements a lock-free parallel breadth-first-search (BFS)-like algorithm and is implemented in the model-checking tool XSpeed. In addition, an application of our simulation engine in property verification of CPS models has been illustrated on two benchmarks. Some model coverage metrics have been defined that users of the tool can specify to set the desired thoroughness of testing with simulations. We demonstrate the performance gains of our simulation engine over SpaceEx and CORA, the modern model checkers and simulators for affine hybrid systems.