Approximated stability analysis of bi-modal hybrid co-simulation scenarios

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in: Cerone A., Roveri M. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10729, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74781-1_24 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.Co-simulation is a technique to orchestrate multiple simulators in order to approximate the behavior of a coupled system as a whole. Simulators execute in a lockstep fashion, each exchanging inputs and output data points with the other simulators at pre-accorded times. In the context of systems with a physical and a cyber part, the communication frequency with which the simulators of each part communicate can have a negative impact in the accuracy of the global simulation results. In fact, the computed behavior can be qualitatively different, compared to the actual behavior of the original system, laying waste to potentially many hours of computation. It is therefore important to develop methods that answer whether a given communication frequency guarantees trustworthy co-simulation results. In this paper, we take a small step in that direction. We develop a technique to approximate the lowest frequency for which a particular set of simulation tools can exchange values in a co-simulation and obtain results that can be trusted.Published versio