Towards a Standard-Conform, Platform-Generic and Feature-Rich Modelica Device Drivers Library

Abstract

There are many cases where simulation applications need to interact with their environment. Typical examples are Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) simulators (including flight, driving, and marine training simulators), Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulators, but also offline process simulators which cannot operate in a completely self-contained manner and therefore need to be coupled to external applications. Embedded control applications are another related area which requires that applications interact with their environment. The Modelica_DeviceDrivers library, which had its first release as open-source library in 2012, tries to cater for such use cases. This paper describes the library for the first time and reports about the numerous challenges that the project experienced to meet its goal of supporting several platforms and tools within a standard-conform, platform-generic, feature-rich, and easy-to-use Modelica library.