Standard efficient Storage of Simulation Results

Abstract

The problem is well known: Each simulator stores its results in its own format. If you want to use these results, you have to write own programs. The access to results may be necessary for evaluation of the simulation results or to compare these with results from another simulator or from measurement. Often the format of the result file is not open and the user has no access to the data. Many simulators provide export of ASCII or CSV files, which makes data access easy. In most cases, however, information supplied in the file is not complete. Also, reading of those files is inefficient and storage of huge amounts of data is almost impossible. In this paper we report about the development of a standard result file format (SRFF) for system simulators. This format is currently developed by the Modelica Design Group. We show the direction into which this development will lead, talk about the advantages of such a format and discuss open issues.