Toward Development of a Virtual Distributed Control System
Moshe Kam, Andres Lebaudy, Yifeng Xu, Erwei Lin, Mianyu Wang · 2004
We describe two simulation and design tools, developed for large-scale distributed control applications. At present, these applications require extensive experimentation with hardware, which is costly, slow, and inflexible. The new simulators allow computerized evaluation of communication requirements and discovery of potential bottlenecks in large-scale systems of actuators, sensors, transport lines and communication networks. They provide designers with easy, quick, and inexpensive methodology to examine, rate, and compare proposed designs. The first tool, the Communication Simulator, is used in early phases of the design, for quick but somewhat rough comparison of architectures. It requires estimates of the basic communication parameters of the nodes. The second tool, the Network Simulator, simulates node dynamics and communication traffic simultaneously, and provides detailed and accurate estimates of parameters such as packet loss, bandwidth utilization, channel throughput, and channel capacity. The simulators were validated using a large-scale dynamic architecture, the Chilled Water Reduced-Scale Advanced Demonstrator.