The SIL step can be bypassed if your controller system will run in a piece of hardware that has a floating point dedicated unit in its CPU datapath. Normally these two steps are made using a single integrated platform in a PC. This step helps the system developer to find fast some wrong memory sizing choices.
In Software-In-The-Loop (SIL) the model used in the MIL test is replaced by an executable code running at the same computer platform in a fixed-point arithmetic manner.
Any problem with the mathematical controller model can be rapidly found and corrected, taking the MIL step a first step of development. The proposal of this step is to generate the reference output test results of your controller to the following steps. The basic idea behind MIL is to generate and validate some test cases of your model in a computing high precision float pointing arithmetic platform, providing the behavior and the quality of your model under a certain computer platform. Ī model-driven system approach starts from the MIL configuration, where basic simulation is performed to analyze the controller model along with the simulated plant model. Each of the configuration levels provides some advances and reduces the gap in the development process that initiate with the mathematical model and ends at the firmware running in a stand-alone microprocessor platform. These tests provide four levels of testing configurations: MIL (Model-In-The-Loop), SIL (Software-In-The-Loop), PIL (Processor-In-The-Loop) and HIL (Hardware-In-The-Loop). This model driven approach is basically used for test and is known as X-In-The-Loop. Recently a model driven development approach, firstly defined by system engineers, has been frequently used as way to reduce the time of development of embedded systems, producing rapid and reliable product in a short time development cycle. However to overcome the controller to a single piece of hardware, involves the codification of this mathematical based model into an appropriate firmware description suited to work correctly in a specific platform. The design of a controller requires a mathematic modeling followed by the adjusting of some model parameters.