Coupling AutoFOCUS3 with other Tools using Co-Simulation

The following sections provide introduction and discuss co-simulation functionality in detail. The inverted pendulum example illustrates the concepts introduced in this section with a co-simulation comprising three tools.

Introduction

AF3 alone cannot satisfy all the needs of system development. Other tools are often needed, e.g., for modeling continuous behavior (for the environment or for analog parts of a system), for interoperability with legacy tools, or simply for using non-AF3 features in combination with AF3 (e.g., visualization).

In such cases, AF3 has co-simulation capabilities which allows to use AF3 simulation with other tools in a synchronous manner. AF3 offers co-simulation functionality in the following two ways:

Co-simulation using FMI (Functional Mockup Interface)

This feature supports for now only FMU export satisfying the following constraints: