A Variable Reference Architecture for the Management and Configuration of Ground Vehicle Simulations

Current workflows for creating simulations of ground vehicle systems are non-standardized and full of bottlenecks and inefficient point-to-point communication. This paper proposes the use of a SysML reference architecture to act as the single source of information for system-level simulation creation. SysML is already used to create reference architectures for system design, but extending it to the simulation domain will require special considerations, including how to represent models at different levels of fidelity, how to have an implementation-independent view of control algorithms, and how to link simulation artifacts to their description model counterparts. This paper details the additional challenges of managing simulations, defines a new simulation perspective for a SysML reference architecture, describes methods for mapping between the simulation and physical perspectives, and discusses the organization of a reference architecture for ground vehicle simulations. The benefits of using a SysML reference architecture for system-level simulation management include having a dynamic and centralized representation of existing simulation components, a standardized architecture to facilitate the creation of new simulations, and streamlined communication with all teams involved in creating simulations, reducing the overall cost of generating system-level simulations of ground vehicles.