Towards a Co-simulation Based Model Assessment Process for System Architecture

Model Based System Engineering and early Validation & Verification are now key enablers for the development of complex systems. However, the current state of the art is not sufficient to achieve a seamless use in an Extended Enterprise (EE) context. Indeed, the various stakeholders must protect their Intellectual Property (IP) while conducting system wide design exploration that relies on each part of the system. Co-simulation standards such as Functional Mock-up Interface provide technological assets to deal with IP management issues for an EE organization. However, this standard is not meant to provide reference processes to support such organizations. We target the development of such a common process based on both the system of interest design models and the EE architecture. The purpose is to build a Simulation Reference Model as a requirement model for the whole co-simulation, the derived IP-protected co-simulation components and the co-simulation platform architecture as well as the method for the validation of system models. We propose to extend the work done for the Model Identity Card and rely on detailed domain specific engineering ontologies and quantitative quality properties for models to express the requirements for the co-simulation components and to reduce the simulation quality loss induced by the co-simulation technologies.