MODELITH: A FRAMEWORK ENABLING TOOL-INDEPENDENT MODELLING AND SIMULATION

Several approaches exist for modelling of physical systems, often implemented in a modelling language. Due to differences in modelling approaches, it is a complicated procedure to interchange information between different modelling languages, documents or applications. This puts a constraint on what the users can do in terms of custom simulators and on what simulation tools they can combine. In order to overcome this situation, a framework named Modelith is presented in this paper that defines the translation procedure from modelling language to executable model in a number of steps. This enables the user to move from a tool-centric to a model-centric view where the models are independent of the simulation tools. An implementation of the framework is presented using XML-based technologies for information management. As an example, it is shown how this implementation can be used to translate a subset of the modelling language Modelica into components for the simulation tool Hopsan.