A Tooled Methodology for the System Architect’s Needs in Simulation with Autonomous Driving Application

Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is a promising solution to formalize and communicate information about the design of complex systems, in particular for the automotive industry which faces new challenges associated to autonomous driving. Numerical simulation is commonly used to support the design of these complex systems, but the possible relations with MBSE should be further investigated. This work, conducted with academic and industrial partners at the research institute IRT SystemX, aims at further bridging the gap between system architecture and numerical simulation. An industrial design problem related to the design of an autonomous vehicle passing traffic lights is used to validate and illustrate new methods and tools based on SysML. Their aim is to: 1) guide the formulation of a question requiring simulation, called solicitation, by the system architect 2) guide the design of a simulation architecture by the simulation architect with a special focus on the consistency with the system. A Java plugin was developed in the SysML editor Papyrus for the solicitation, and a SysML metamodel was defined for the simulation architecture. The solicitation associated to the industrial design problem is answered by a multiobjective optimization of the vehicle's cost and electrical consumption using a co-simulation between the tools Simulink and Amesim.