Ricardo Software, makers of IGNITE, a complete vehicle system simulation software, announced a partnership with Modelon to include access to OPTIMICA’s Complier Toolkit, a computational platform based on a Modelica and functional mock interface (FMI) for system design. IGNITE users will have immediate access to OPTIMICA’s Compiler Toolkit in a product release that is coming up in May.
IGNITE
If you’re not familiar with IGNITE, it is used for basically any process in the development phase of vehicle design. It has strong powertrain and thermofluid libraries and is utilized for everything from drive cycle simulation, vehicle energy efficiency and flow analysis to power integration analysis. The powertrain libraries are pretty amazing in that users are empowered to efficiently model complete conventional, hybrid-electric, full-electric and experimental vehicle architectures. Powered by HEEDS, IGNITE’s built-in design and optimization toolbox is well suited for integration with OPTIMICA’s Compiler Toolkit, as it has both Modelica standard language support and FMI support.
OPTIMICA Compiler Toolkit
The OPTIMICA Compiler Toolkit offers users a multifaceted environment to solve steady-state simulation and optimization issues. Based on MATLAB and Python, users interact with scripting APIs, allowing for the creation of custom work flows that support custom design flows packed with sequences of computations. Used during control system design to understand the limits of performance, dynamic optimization is also a lynchpin for accelerated control strategies like nonlinear model predictive control. It has support for encrypted libraries to protect users’ models as well as for hand-guided tearing to make full use of system structure in steady-state computations.
Benefits for System Simulation Users
The main idea behind the partnership is to give IGNITE users access to faster compilation and simulation speeds and upsize compatibility with Modelica libraries (both open source and proprietary). More support of the FMI is built in to this integration, which will enable a smoother pursuit of multidomain and multiscale studies within IGNITE.
This combination of bleeding-edge modeling, computational technology and industry expertise together will hopefully underscore the best elements of IGNITE’s ground vehicle performance and fuel economy simulation capability with Modelon’s expertise in FMI technology and Modelica.
The release will happen sometime in May, so we’ll keep you posted.