Model Interface Specification and Environment to Support Model Integration

Principal Investigators

• Gregory Mocko (PI), Clemson University
• Gang Li, Bing Li, Chris Paredis, Atul Kelkar (Co‐ PIs) Clemson University

Students

• Ed Louis, Ryan Coletti, Andrew Montalbano, Zhimin Chen, Evan Taylor, Clemson University

Government

• Matt Castanier, U.S. Army GVSC

Industry

• Nader Fateh, ESTECO
• Qamar Ahsan, Ford Motor Company

Project duration: June 2020 - Q4-2022.

The development of next generation ground vehicles often requires the use of models across multiple disciplines, domains, organizations, and software environments. While this is a necessary characteristic of the vehicle development process, it causes information exchange and model integration challenges. To alleviate these challenges, a formal specification to enable plug‐and‐play model composition and the associated model integration framework will be researched, and recommendations will be made to overcome current GVSC challenges. This project bridges the gap between mission definition (SA3.1) and trade space analysis and exploration (SA3.3). Further, integration specifications and environment resulting from this project will inform the model development in FA1 and FA2 and will be used to integrate these models Deep Orange.

The primary objective of this project is to support comprehensive model‐based vehicle development by 1) developing an approach to catalog simulation and analysis models across various disciplines and domains, 2) identify the requirements and formalize a standardized model interface specification, building on existing industry and commercial efforts, 3) evaluate existing modeling and model integration frameworks to understand the needs for next‐generation vehicle development and acquisition, 4) deploy a model integration framework so support next generation vehicle development. The objectives of this project will be to leverage existing practices and standard workflow at GVSC, identify commercial and existing software architectures and applications and extend to support the needs of GVSC modeling and simulations. The fundamental questions addressed in this research include:

• What information must be shared by analysis models to enable efficient and effective model integration and co‐simulation?
• What approaches and mechanisms are needed to organize and share models within a shared repository and how will modeling and simulation experts access and retrieve models?
• What are the coordination mechanisms that enable multiple models to be composed into richer simulation scenarios and how is uncertainty propagated across simulations?

#5.A79