Dynamic simulation of complex mechatronic systems can be carried out in an efficient and modular way making use of weakly coupled co-simulation setups. When using this approach, multirate methods are often needed to improve the efficiency, since the physical components of the system usually have different frequencies and time scales. However, most multirate methods have been designed for strongly coupled setups, and their application in weakly coupled co-simulation is not straightforward due to the limitations enforced by commercial simulation tools used in mechatronics design. This work describes a weakly coupled multirate method intended to be a generic multirate interface between block diagram software and multibody dynamics simulators, arranged in a co-simulation setup. Its main advantage is that it does not enforce equidistant or synchronized communication time-grids and, therefore, it can be easily applied to set up weakly-coupled co-simulations using off-the-shelf commercial block diagram simulators while giving the user a great flexibility for selecting the integration scheme for each subsystem.
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