Methodology : Rational Statemate in a Systems-Engineering Environment

Rational Statemate in a Systems-Engineering Environment

There are several ways of interfacing Rational Statemate to other Systems Engineering Tools (see the Rational Statemate Interfaces figure.)

Rational Statemate Interfaces

Co-simulation is where the simulators of both Rational Statemate and other Systems Engineering (SE) tools are running concurrently, and data is passed from one tool to the other. The advantage of this method is that you have good visibility into the design through the graphical animation and/or analysis and debugging capabilities of these simulators.

However, co-simulation trades off performance for flexible analysis and debugging capabilities as both simulators must be running. Continuous time models in particular are computation-intensive and hence cause simulations to run relatively slowly.

Code-to-code interface is another option. By generating code from both tools, you can integrate the code to provide a single executable. This provides the best execution performance, but at the cost of lesser control and visibility of what is happening in the model.

Rational Statemate also provides a mechanism for connecting C code to the Rational Statemate simulation. By doing this, performance is maintained at acceptable levels because the most computation-intensive parts are being run as C executables and the engineers still have the full graphical animation and debug facilities of the simulator.

Connecting C code to the simulator is perhaps the most pragmatic approach to systems analysis and design as it allows any SE tool to be linked with Rational Statemate without the necessity of a custom interface.

This ability to integrate external code into models makes Rational Statemate the ideal tool for use as the systems testbench. By bringing together models from different domains/tools into a single analysis, Rational Statemate provides a unified environment for the complete system analysis.