Constructs for Meta Properties Modeling in Modelica

Abstract

This article proposes two new language constructs for meta-properties modeling in Modelica: 1) Accessing all instances of a given class and 2) extracting in a convenient way the desired information from such instances by allowing to pass type compatible model instances as arguments to functions. In several applications the usefulness of the proposed features are shown. In particular global properties of a model can be computed, such as total power, total mass, total center of mass, or kinetic and potential energy of a multi-body system. An important application is to bind behavioral models and requirement models in a convenient way, for example checking requirements for all instances of a class in a behavioral model, without changing the behaviorl model.