Harnessing Concurrency in Synchronous Block Diagrams to Parallelize Simulation on Multi-Core Hosts

Model-based and simulation-supported engineering based on the formalism of synchronous block diagrams is among the best practices in software development for embedded and real-time systems. As the complexity of such models and the associated computational demands for their simulation steadily increase, efficient execution strategies are needed. Although there is an inherent concurrency in most models, tools are not always capable of taking advantage of multi-core architectures of simulation host computers to simulate blocks in parallel. In this paper, we outline the conceptual obstacles in general and discuss them specifically for the widely used simulation environment Simulink. We present an execution mechanism that harnesses multi-core hosts for accelerating individual simulation runs through parallelization. The approach is based on a model transformation. It does not require any changes in the simulation engine, but introduces minimal data propagation delays in the simulated signal chains. We demonstrate its applicability in an automotive case study.