Bridging the Semantic Gap Between Heterogeneous Modeling Formalisms and FMI

FMI (Functional Mockup Interface) is a standard for exchanging and co-simulating model components (called FMUs) coming from potentially different modeling formalisms, languages, and tools. Previous work has proposed a formal model for the co-simulation part of the FMI standard, and also presented two co-simulation algorithms which can be proven to have desirable properties, such as determinacy, provided the FMUs satisfy a formal contract. In this paper we discuss the principles for encoding different modeling formalisms, including state machines (both untimed and timed), discrete-event systems, and synchronous dataflow, as FMUs. The challenge is to bridge the various semantic gaps (untimed vs. timed, signals vs. events, etc.) that arise because of the heterogeneity between these modeling formalisms and the FMI API.