Sharc: Simulator for Hardware Architecture and Real-time Control

Tight coupling between computation, communication, and control pervades the design and application of cyber-physical systems (CPSs). Due to the complexity of these systems, advanced design procedures that account for these tight interconnections are paramount to ensure the safe and reliable operation of control algorithms under computational constraints. This paper presents the Simulator for Hardware Architecture and Real-time Control (Sharc) to assist in the co-design of control algorithms and the computational hardware on which they are run. Sharc simulates the execution of a user-specified control algorithm on a given processor microarchitecture configuration, evaluating how computational constraints affect the dynamical properties of the closed-loop system. We illustrate the power of Sharc by examples of MPC applied to adaptive cruise control and the stabilization of an inverted pendulum. Sharc can be found at github.com/pwintz/sharc.