Visualization and interactive simulation of Modelica models for control education

  • Authors:
  • Carla Martin-Villalba;Alfonso Urquia;Sebastian Dormido

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. Informatica y Automatica, UNED, Madrid, Spain;Dept. Informatica y Automatica, UNED, Madrid, Spain;Dept. Informatica y Automatica, UNED, Madrid, Spain

  • Venue:
  • CCDC'09 Proceedings of the 21st annual international conference on Chinese control and decision conference
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

An approach to the implementation of virtual-labs well-suited for control education is proposed. The virtual-lab model is described in the Modelica language and it is adapted for interactive simulation by applying a systematic methodology. The virtual-lab view (i.e., the user-to-model interactive interface) is composed by connecting predefined components of Interactive, a free Modelica library presented in this manuscript. Interactive contains a set of ready-touse Modelica models of visual interactive elements (i.e., containers, animated 3D geometric shapes and interactive controls), intended to facilitate easy definition of the virtual-lab view and the model-to-view communication. Finally, the Modelica description of the virtual-lab is translated into executable code using the Dymola modeling environment. The interactive component models provided in the Interactive library are C++ code generators: when the virtual-lab is executed, the C++ code describing the virtual-lab view and the bidirectional model-to-view communication is automatically generated. The generated C++ code uses the VTK and Qt libraries. The proposed approach is illustrated by means of an example: the development of the virtual-lab of a double-pipe heat exchanger, which is intended for chemical-process control education.