Project Overview
The project Safe and Secure Modeling and Simulation on the GRID is a research project funded by Vinnova, where partners from both academia and industry participate. The project started in April 2006 and is planned to finish in the end of March 2009.Challenges
Current trends in global industrial markets present critical challenges for Swedish industry:
- Increased competition, shorter product life cycles, higher demands on flexibility and short time-to-market in product design and production.
- Increased complexity and software fraction of most industrial products, including telecom industry, mechanical and mechatronic systems, process industry, etc., but also for new sectors such as bioinformatics.
- Increased interdependence, cooperation, and information exchange between system integrators and component suppliers.
Objectives
To address these challenges, virtual prototyping of complex products, using computer-based modeling and simulation is a key technology. However, the increased complexity of products and increased interdependence require safe and secure solutions for modeling and simulation especially when using networked computer systems (here called the GRID, see also the next section), usually needed for high performance or when several organizations are involved.
We have the following main objectives in the project:
- Increased system safety and robustness by correctness and integrity of models and model components, also in a distributed setting, (through static checking, strong typing, unit checking, etc) of a strongly typed modeling language (e.g Modelica, BML/MML).
- Increased safety of parallel and distributed programs and models, e.g. by incorporating support for simple and well-structured parallel programming models such as NestStep.
- Increased data security by establishing secure communication channels for on-line co-simulation of subsystem models, where each subsystem model resides with its owner, e.g. used for cooperation between subcontractors and system integrators.
- Increased model security, e.g. by allowing component models from subcontractors or divisions in a large company to be sent to a system integrator for whole system simulation, without the model source becoming available to the system integrator.
- Increased robustness, by using robust modeling and simulation tools with numeric solvers that seldom break down and are less sensitive to specific problem formulations.
- Increased support for safe flexible configuration and simulation of connected subsystems (model components) on the GRID.
- The strongly typed Modelica modeling language and the related open source OpenModelica implementation constitutes the main research platform in the project. The BML/MML modeling languages are also included in the research platform of the project.