Toward Development of a Virtual Distributed Control System

Abstract

We describe two simulation and design tools, developed for large-scale distributed control applications. At present, these applications require extensive experimentation with hardware, which is costly, slow, and inflexible. The new simulators allow computerized evaluation of communication requirements and discovery of potential bottlenecks in large-scale systems of actuators, sensors, transport lines and communication networks. They provide designers with easy, quick, and inexpensive methodology to examine, rate, and compare proposed designs. The first tool, the Communication Simulator, is used in early phases of the design, for quick but somewhat rough comparison of architectures. It requires estimates of the basic communication parameters of the nodes. The second tool, the Network Simulator, simulates node dynamics and communication traffic simultaneously, and provides detailed and accurate estimates of parameters such as packet loss, bandwidth utilization, channel throughput, and channel capacity. The simulators were validated using a large-scale dynamic architecture, the Chilled Water Reduced-Scale Advanced Demonstrator.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 14, 2004
Accession Number
ADA423011

Entities

People

  • Andres Lebaudy
  • Erwei Lin
  • Mianyu Wang
  • Moshe Kam
  • Yifeng Xu

Organizations

  • Drexel University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Ground and Sea Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Application Software
  • C Programming Language
  • Communication Channels
  • Communication Networks
  • Computer Networks
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Control Systems
  • Data Transmission
  • Human-Machine Interfaces
  • Multiple Access
  • Network Protocols
  • Operating Systems
  • Programming Languages
  • Software Design
  • Throughput

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Radio communications and signal processing.