This presentation was made at CAASE18, The Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering. CAASE18 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues.

Resource Abstract

The purpose of this workshop is to give an introduction to why the Functional Mock-Up Interface (FMI) is needed and how it can be used for collaborative model-based system development, analysis, and deployment. FMI reduces the barriers for coupling tools coming from different domains and thus enables left-shifting the virtual design effort for system design in true, analytic MBSE. The workshop will introduce the FMI standard and its specification including relevant use cases. Focus will be given to the issue of how to define model boundaries that will allow successful co-simulation. This will include guidelines and best practices for model decomposition. Numerical consequences and limits of performance for co-simulation of transient systems will be given and demonstrated with hands-on use cases. In addition, the workshop will be used to demonstrate system integration workflow automation and continuous engineering best practices for model based design.

The upcoming System-Structure and Parameterization (SSP) standard, currently under development by the Modelica Association will also be presented briefly. The first public release of SSP is expected before the CAASE 18 conference. The current draft of SSP will be used in the workshop to capture the system structure, and system level parameterization in a standardized way. SSP is designed to be as a companion standard to FMI, but covers additional model formats beyond FMI.

For this workshop, we will use the example of an industrially relevant use case and assume that the mechanical part, the actuation hydraulics, and the controls are modeled in three different tools and exported from each tool as a Functional Mockup Unit (FMU). For the workshop, all models are modeled in Modelica to allow evaluation of the differences between single tool simulation and co-simulation. This use case example will form the red thread of the workshop with export of the model from several FMI exporting tools and then integration of the exported FMUs into a systems model in an FMI integration tool. The system model will in turn be executed in several FMI importing tools. Lastly, use cases for automated testing and execution of the system will be demonstrated.