Real-Time Simulation in Non Real-Time Environment

Simulation in real-time is a very useful tool because of didactical and practical benefits. Very important benefit of real-time simulation is a fact that operator's decision can be taken into account in the same time scale as the real system would work. This enables construction of simulators, and opportunity to test control algorithms in Hardware in The Loop scheme using target industrial equipment. Professional real-time environments like Simulink Desktop Real-Time (formerly known as Real-Time Windows Target) and Simulink Real-Time (formerly known as xPC) are devoted rather to research than dissemination purposes. Real-time simulator for a mass audience must be made with widely accessible environment e.g. Windows OS or Web browser. So we have here a paradoxical expectation: real-time simulator in non real-time environment. Authors developed soft real-time solver that is able to adapt its time step to actual computational effort of the system. Approach presented in the paper is based on the idea of following after the real-time when the computed time step is larger than a priori assumed global time step of the simulation. Derivative functionality of this adaptive solver is the ability to determine the number of real-time violations during the simulation horizon. Execution of a priori simulation benchmark allows to determine which step of the simulation will meet the requirements of real-time simulation. Based on reference data it can be determined which step of simulation will provide results with smallest error.