Automotive model exchange using VHDL-AMS: a benchmark

The MSR consortium (German car makers and suppliers) is seeking unified methods for easy exchange of product specifications including plant models. An inspection of typical examples brought up a minimal set of necessary capabilities which are summarised within this paper. For unified modelling the language needs to support signal-flow (non-conservative) and energy-flow (conservative) communication between components of such systems, furthermore, it needs discrete-time (event-driven, finite automata) and continuous-time (DAE) modelling including interaction between both. A short summary of one such example is given within this paper. The example includes stick/slip-friction as well as a soft stop defined as a characteristic table. Besides some open issues related to fast simulation and graphical representation, VHDL-AMS supports the demanded features pretty well