Integration of Control Designs and Simulation Models into a Modular Real-Time Platform

The increasing use of rapid prototyping and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing in the design process for embedded control applications motivates the need for a standard, portable, scalable real-time system that interfaces to control design software. This paper will discuss tools that are used to implement control designs and simulation models in real-time, as well as a case study of one such application. In addition, the paper will discuss tradeoffs between the use of the same real-time platform for both control prototyping and hardware-in-the-loop simulation and the use of different platforms for each task. The tradeoffs between the use of custom solutions for these applications and the use of commercial off-the-shelf hardware will also be discussed.