Methods for real-time simulation of Cyber-Physical Systems: application to automotive domain

The design, development and validation of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is increasingly relying on real-time simulation. In many domains, such as automotive powertrain engineering, there exists a variety of precise physical models, but whose computational complexity leads engineers to perform model reductions in order to fit real-time execution requirements for Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) simulation. The resulting validity domain reduction is conflicting with the growing need for more precise models in validation stages. In this paper we list several alternative methods to succeed in real-time simulation of complex physical models and describe how we applied these to an industrial use case. This case study aims at running, on a 6-core PC, a real-time Diesel engine simulator including phenomenological combustion models.