Validation Framework for Time-Triggered System-of-Systems

System-of-Systems (SoS) with real-time communication networks are gaining more importance for many safety-relevant application areas such as automotive, medical monitoring and telemedicine in health-care systems. This paper introduces a simulation framework capable of generating and simulating application scenarios of both time-triggered and rate-constrained messages with their respective communication schedules with real-time requirements. The scenarios are generated where applications are introduced over time in the SoS. After that, the inputs are processed over time with an incremental scheduler that produces a trace of schedules to be simulated using OPNET. The incremental scheduling problem for the constituent systems is formulated as an Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem using IBM CPLEX. In addition, the simulation framework provides verification functions in terms of the evaluation of schedulability and run-time, estimation of worst-case latency for time-triggered and rate-constrained messages.