The goal of the composable simulation project is to develop a modeling and simulation environment in which designers of mechatronic systems can quickly and easily verify whether their designs meet functional requirements.

The cost of design is determined to a large extent by the cost of design verification. Until recently, design verification required building a physical prototype of the design artifact—a costly and time-consuming process even when rapid prototyping equipment is used. Design verification based on functional simulations can therefore provide significant reductions in cycle time and cost.

To achieve rapid and inexpensive design verification, it is important that simulations can be created effortlessly at any stage of the design cycle. Therefore, we are developing a simulation framework that is tightly integrated with the design environment (i.e. CAD software) and that can be used by the designer directly with minimal intervention of simulation experts.

Overview Presentation

By composable simulation, we mean the ability to automatically generate system-level simulations from individual component models by manipulating the corresponding physical components in a CAD system.  The novelty of this modeling paradigm lies in the following three properties:

• Simulation models are composed in an object-oriented, hierarchical fashion from model fragments.
• Multiple models are associated with a single system component. These models are organized in a reconfigurable model in which model fragments can be easily reconfigured (through composition and instantiation) to suit a particular simulation experiment.
• Model parameters are automatically extracted from the corresponding CAD geometry and material properties.