A Distributed Heterogeneous Simulation of a Representative Aircraft Power System

In this paper, a new technique useful for the numerical simulation of large-scale systems is presented. This approach enables the overall system simulation to be formed by the dynamic interconnection of the various interdependent simulations, each representing a specific component or subsystem such as electrical, mechanical, hydraulic, or thermal. Each simulation may be developed separately using possibly different commercial-off-the-shelf simulation programs thereby allowing the most suitable language or tool to be used based on the design/analysis needs. For the purpose of demonstration, this technique is applied to a detailed simulation of a representative aircraft power system. This system is comprised of ten component models each developed using MATLAB/Simulink™, EASY5™, or ACSL™. When the ten component simulations were distributed across just four personal computers (PCs), a greater than 15-fold improvement in simulation speed (compared to the single-computer implementation) was achieved.