Model transformations for round-trip engineering in control deployment co-design

When developing a control algorithm for a mechatronic system, its deployment on hardware is rarely taken into account. Hardware properties such as execution performance, memory consumption, communication delays, buffer sizes, (un)reliability of the communication channel, etc. are often not the first concern of the control engineer. However, these properties may have important effects on the control loop behaviour such that initial requirements may no longer be fulfilled. To tackle this issue, we propose a Round-Trip Engineering (RTE) method allowing for a semi-automatic integration of hardware properties, corresponding to the deployment, into the control model. The proposed RTE method combines techniques of model transformations and model-based design space exploration. The resulting method will enable an engineer to further enhance the control model based on implementation properties such that the initial requirements are still satisfied when deployed on the target hardware platform.