Development and Evaluation of Collaborative Embedded Systems using Simulation

Embedded systems are increasingly equipped with open interfaces that enable communication and collaboration with other embedded systems, thus forming collaborative embedded systems (CESs). This new class of embedded systems, capable of collaborating with each other, is planned at design time and forms collaborative system groups (CSGs) at runtime. When they are part of a collaboration, systems can negotiate tactical goals, with the aim of achieving higher level strategic goals that cannot be achieved otherwise. The design and operation of CESs face specific challenges, such as operation in an open context that dynamically changes in ways that cannot be predicted at design time, collaborations with systems that dynamically change their behavior during runtime, and much more. In this new perspective, simulation techniques are crucially important to support testing and evaluation in unknown environments. In this chapter, we present a set of challenges that the design, testing, and operation of CESs face, and we provide an overview of simulation methods that address those specific challenges.