Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are smart systems that include engineered interacting networks of physical and computational components. The tight integration of a wide range of heterogeneous components enables new functionality and quality of life improvements in critical infrastructures such as smart cities, intelligent buildings, and smart energy systems. One approach to study CPS uses both simulations and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) to test the physical dynamics of hardware in a controlled environment. However, because CPS experiment design may involve domain experts from multiple disciplines who use different simulation tool suites, it can be a challenge to integrate the heterogeneous simulation languages and hardware interfaces into a single experiment. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is working on the development of a universal CPS environment for federation (UCEF) that can be used to design and run experiments that incorporate heterogeneous physical and computational resources over a wide geographic area. This development environment uses the High Level Architecture (HLA), which the Department of Defense has advocated for co-simulation in the field of distributed simulations, to enable communication between hardware and different simulation languages such as Simulink® and LabVIEW®. This paper provides an overview of UCEF and motivates how the environment could be used to develop energy experiments using an illustrative example of an emulated heat pump system.
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Synthesizing Efficient Hardware from High-Level Functional Hardware Description Languages
Functional hardware description languages (FHDL) provide powerful tools for building new abstractions that enable sophisticated hardware system to be constructed by composing small reusable parts. Raising the level of abstractions in hardware designs means the programmer can focus on high-level circuit structure rather than mundane low-level details. The language features that facilitate this include high-order functions, rich static type system with type inference, and parametric polymorphism. We use hand-written structural and behavioral VHDL, Simulink, and the Kansas Lava FHDL to re-implement several components taken from a Simulink model of an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) physical layer (PHY). Our development demonstrates that an FHDL can require fewer lines of code than traditional design languages without sacrificing performance.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1717088
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10195987
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 26th IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 634 to 637
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICECS46596.2019.8964954
