CoHLA: Design space exploration and co-simulation made easy

The inherent multi-disciplinary nature of cyber-physical systems makes it difficult to get early insight in key system properties and trade-offs that have to be made. Our aim is to support system architects of such systems by facilitating the co-simulation of models from different disciplines and design space exploration. This has been achieved by defining a domain-specific language called CoHLA which allows a high-level description of a system architecture and simulation parameters to be specified. A generator has been implemented that generates a co-simulation of component models using an implementation of the HLA standard. Component models that adhere to the FMI standard can be incorporated easily. Moreover, CoHLA includes primitives to express design space parameters and metrics; this information is used to generate tooling for automated design space exploration.