Tool for Analysis and Simulation of TTCAN Communication in Distributed Systems

The possibility of reproducing a real time distributed system's communications in a laboratory can be a great help, as much for communication protocol design as for communication debugging. Often, it is not possible to physically reproduce the system in a laboratory, be it for the high number of nodes in the system or because said nodes cannot be made to work outside their environment. In such cases, a computer simulation of the behavior of the nodes is necessary. This paper presents the development of a tool which can simulate and analyze communications in a distributed system which uses TTCAN bus communication. This tool has been put to use in the analysis of communications within the European Commission funded SmartFuel project. In it, a distributed control fuel system for fixed and rotary wing aircraft was designed, which used this bus for communications between nodes