Minimizing discretization errors and event impacts in continuous system simulations

To validate cyber-physical systems, engineers must simulate both the continuous physical behaviour and the digital controller together. When these are connected using fixed time steps, important changes between updates can be missed, causing distorted signals and delayed detection of safety violations. In this paper we address these limitations by extending the FERAL simulation framework with a derivative-aware communication interface and an adaptive rollback mechanism. Our approach enables subsystems to extrapolate inputs continuously using First-Order Hold and allows the simulator to retroactively correct timing errors by re-simulating critical windows with high precision. We validated this methodology using an Adaptive Emergency Brake case study. Although the standard baseline simulation failed to prevent a collision due to an 891 ms detection delay, our proposed method achieved a safe stop with a response latency of <1 ms, effectively eliminating the synchronization error. Performance analysis confirms that this 99.8% accuracy improvement is achieved with only a marginal computational overhead, utilizing the hierarchical architecture of the framework to execute targeted rollbacks of only the affected components to the exact time of the event.