A methodology for improving software design lifecycle in embedded control systems

Control design and real-time implementation are usually performed in isolation. The effects of the computer implementation on control system performance are still evaluated on the last phases of the development cycle. It is expected that modeling the computer implementation in order to simulate its impact on control would help reducing the length and the effort of the development cycle. This paper proposes ideas towards achieving these objectives. To this end, implementation effect on control performance is first studied. Then, we describe the preliminary ideas of a methodology considering a control law designed with the Scicos simulation environment and implemented on a distributed architecture with the SynDEx system-level CAD tool. This methodology allows simulating the impact of the distributed implementation early in the design lifecycle and provides an automatic code generation of this implementation.