CAMAS, a Computer Aided Modelling, Analysis and Simulation Environment

Summary

Modelling and simulation of technical systems is rather error-prone. A part of the errors may be due to the fact that the commonly used CSSL’s (Continuous Systems Simulation Languages], have some important deficiencies. They have a good performance in the computational sense but are not designed for structured modelling. Furthermore often not much support for the man-machine dialogue is offered, and the formalism they use for model description is not related to physics. In this contribution a modelling and simulation aid especially designed for structured physics-based model description is discussed. This aid, CAMAS (Computer Aided Modelling, Analysis and Simulation), may be used interactively.

CAMAS accepts the model description language SIDOPS (Structured Inter-disciplinary Description Of Physical Systems) as input. SIDOPS is based on a physical systems theory and defined in such a way that structured description of models is encouraged. A part of CAMAS is a SIDOPS interpreter, which, as an interactive means for model input, can improve the man-machine dialog. On-line checking of the input on syntactic errors and generating proper error messages is one of its features. As SIDOPS is based on a (multi-disciplinar) physical systems theory (bond graphs), with use of a SIDOPS interpreter also semantic errors can be detected.